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Full-Text Articles in Women's History

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman Nov 2018

A Tangled Web: Quakers And The Atlantic Slave System 1625 – 1770., Kate Freedman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation re-contextualizes the Quakers’ history as anti-slavery pioneers by exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the British West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the seventeenth and eighteenth century Atlantic world. Quakers were driven by their faith to foster a spirit of equality inside and outside of their meetings. They were among the first European religious sects to allow women to preach, to oppose violence and war, and, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth-century, to ban the practice of enslaving other human beings within their membership. Yet the Quakers …


"No Seas Can Now Divide Us": Captains' Wives, Sister Sailors, And The New England Whalefishery, 1840-1870, Amanda L. Goodheart Oct 2018

"No Seas Can Now Divide Us": Captains' Wives, Sister Sailors, And The New England Whalefishery, 1840-1870, Amanda L. Goodheart

Doctoral Dissertations

Between 1840 and 1870, nearly three hundred whaling captains’ wives accompanied their husbands at sea aboard New England whaleships. Unlike previous scholarship which has analyzed these women solely within the context of mid-nineteenth century domesticity, this study argues these women effected real and lasting change within their communities and the New England whalefishery. By going to sea with their husbands, women like Mary Brewster, Susan Veeder, and Elizabeth Marble defied longstanding gendered traditions wherein men hunted whales at sea and women supported those efforts ashore. In doing so, they joined the ranks of the sister sailors, a term first created …