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Marital Cruelty In Antebellum America
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Book Synopsis Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America by : Robin C. Sager
Download or read book Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America written by Robin C. Sager and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager probes the struggles of aggrieved spouses shedding light on the nature of marriage and violence in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. Analyzing over 1,500 divorce records that reveal intimate details of marriages in conflict in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840--1860, Sager offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of ordinary Americans shaken by accusations of cruelty. At a time when the standard for an ideal marriage held that both partners adequately perform their respective duties, hostility often arose from ongoing domestic struggles for power. Despite a rise in the then novel expectation of marriage as a companionate relationship, and even in the face of liberalized divorce grounds, marital conflicts often focused on violations of duty, not lack of love. Sager describes how, in this environment, cruelty was understood as a failure to fulfill expectations and as a weapon to brutally enforce more traditional interpretations of marital duty. Sager's findings also challenge historical literature's assumptions about the regional influences on violence, showing that married southerners were no more or less violent than their midwestern counterparts. Her work reveals how definitions and perceptions of cruelty varied according to the gender of victim and perpetrator. Correcting historical mischaracterizations of women's violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, Sager finds antebellum wives both capable and willing to commit a wide variety of cruelties within their marriages. Her research provides details about the reality of nineteenth-century conjugal unions, including the deep unhappiness buried within them.
Book Synopsis Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America by : Robin C. Sager
Download or read book Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America written by Robin C. Sager and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2016-07-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, Robin C. Sager probes the struggles of aggrieved spouses shedding light on the nature of marriage and violence in the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. Analyzing over 1,500 divorce records that reveal intimate details of marriages in conflict in Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin from 1840--1860, Sager offers a rare glimpse into the private lives of ordinary Americans shaken by accusations of cruelty. At a time when the standard for an ideal marriage held that both partners adequately perform their respective duties, hostility often arose from ongoing domestic struggles for power. Despite a rise in the then novel expectation of marriage as a companionate relationship, and even in the face of liberalized divorce grounds, marital conflicts often focused on violations of duty, not lack of love. Sager describes how, in this environment, cruelty was understood as a failure to fulfill expectations and as a weapon to brutally enforce more traditional interpretations of marital duty. Sager's findings also challenge historical literature's assumptions about the regional influences on violence, showing that married southerners were no more or less violent than their midwestern counterparts. Her work reveals how definitions and perceptions of cruelty varied according to the gender of victim and perpetrator. Correcting historical mischaracterizations of women's violence as trivial, rare, or defensive, Sager finds antebellum wives both capable and willing to commit a wide variety of cruelties within their marriages. Her research provides details about the reality of nineteenth-century conjugal unions, including the deep unhappiness buried within them.
Book Synopsis Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America by : St. John Richardson Liddell
Download or read book Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America written by St. John Richardson Liddell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1997-11-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: St. John Richardson Liddell (1815--1870), a conspicuous combat leader in the Army of Tennessee, was an important eyewitness to the making of history. A prominent Louisiana planter, he also served on the staffs of P.G.T. Beauregard, William J. Hardee, and Albert Sidney Johnston during the conflict and traveled in the upper circles of the Confederate military and political high command. In 1866, disillusioned and embittered by defeat, Liddell penned his memoirs for his sons. More than a description of his wartime experiences, Liddell's Record is one man's judgment on why the Confederacy failed, offering blunt, often harsh criticisms of Confederate leadership and fellow soldiers rarely found in such personal accounts.
Book Synopsis Bound in Wedlock by : Tera W. Hunter
Download or read book Bound in Wedlock written by Tera W. Hunter and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage. “A remarkable book... Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils... An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.” —Wall Street Journal “In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.” —Vibe “A groundbreaking history... Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother
Book Synopsis The Racial Origins of U.S. Domestic Violence Law by : Margo Mahan
Download or read book The Racial Origins of U.S. Domestic Violence Law written by Margo Mahan and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates the historical emergence of wife-beating laws in the United States. The key questions I investigate are: What were the social conditions in which wife- beating laws emerged in the nineteenth-century South? What do these conditions reveal about the primary functions of these laws? Based on analysis of 19th-century legal and government data, local and appellate case records, federal reports, Freedman's Bureau documents, periodical data, and family records, I argue that Southern wife-beating laws were a white supremacist post-Civil War response to the legalization of black family formation. They functioned to control black labor and degrade the status of blackness. My research challenges conventional accounts about the historical origins of U.S. domestic violence legislation. Since the proliferation of early wife-beating laws (1870-1900) coincided with first wave feminism, scholarship assumes that they were the result of feminist agency and borne out of a desire to protect women. These assumptions have led to two important limitations in domestic violence scholarship. First, most scholarship focuses on the North, where first wave feminism flourished. Second, even when research considers the effects of other social factors, such as race and class, it foregrounds the effects of feminist agency. Both limitations are troubling because the first state to legally rescind a husband's right to chastise his wife was Alabama, whose 1871 Fulgham v. State ruling was also the country's first in which the litigants were black. In fact, anti-wife-beating laws proliferated throughout southern states where, like Alabama, there was neither a feminist movement, nor female collective action against wife-beating. By the early 1900s, the ideological association between wife-beating and black families was so pervasive that denying "wife-beaters" the vote was a device some southern states used to disenfranchise black men. In contrast to the feminist narrative, I argue that southern anti-wife-beating laws were a postbellum response to the racialized and gendered convergence of the antebellum Master- slave and Husband-wife relationships. Antebellum socio-legal norms simultaneously advanced marital cruelty protections for wives on the one hand and encouraged the physical chastisement of slaves on the other. This ensured that the authority to beat slave women - to include de facto slave wives - was a specifically white male prerogative; and, it added physical chastisement to a long list of naturalized distinctions between blackness and whiteness. Emancipation exposed the fragility of 'domestic relations' - and thus the 1 southern way of life - by highlighting its dependence on racialized gender hierarchies. Wife- beating laws that threatened to punish black men, in the midst of socio-legal norms that kept black women vulnerable to white male violence, helped to restore a southern way of life that simultaneously controlled the labor and degraded the status of black families. The dissertation has six chapters. The introductory chapter provides the theoretical framework for the project. Wife-beating cases, I argue, performed the crucial socio-legal function of reinforcing domestic gender norms - norms that were inextricably articulated through race and class, given the southern household's distinctive Master-slave relationship. Chapter Two reveals that the antebellum progression of laws created a racialized double- standard for wife-beating, in which the prerogative to chastise white wives and slave men's de facto wives, was a privilege exclusive to white men. Chapter Three begins after the Civil war, when the Reconstruction amendments led Southern states to legally recognize black marriages and families. But the antebellum racialized double-standard for wife-beating nevertheless endured, criminalizing black men as wife-beaters in a burgeoning law and order regime that enabled control over black labor. Chapter Four elucidates how, the racialization of wife-beating as a black crime functioned to symbolize and reify a hegemonic ideology of black family dysfunction. Chapter Five examines how wife-beating is eventually used to disenfranchise black men. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation. Situated at the intersection of sociology of family, political economy, criminalization, and 19th-century southern historical literatures, my dissertation reveals how racial projects to symbolically and materially privilege Whiteness motivated the emergence of "feminist" laws that scholarship and social policy largely conceptualize as apart from race, class, and market forces.
Download or read book Female Husbands written by Jen Manion and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A timely and comprehensive history of female husbands in Anglo-America from the eighteenth through the turn of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Family Or Freedom written by Emily West and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the antebellum South, the presence of free people of color was problematic to the white population. Not only were they possible assistants to enslaved people and potential members of the labor force; their very existence undermined popular justifications for slavery. It is no surprise that, by the end of the Civil War, nine Southern states had enacted legal provisions for the "voluntary" enslavement of free blacks. What is surprising to modern sensibilities and perplexing to scholars is that some individuals did petition to rescind their freedom. Family or Freedom investigates the incentives for free African Americans living in the antebellum South to sacrifice their liberty for a life in bondage. Author Emily West looks at the many factors influencing these dire decisions -- from desperate poverty to the threat of expulsion -- and demonstrates that the desire for family unity was the most important consideration for African Americans who submitted to voluntary enslavement. The first study of its kind to examine the phenomenon throughout the South, this meticulously researched volume offers the most thorough exploration of this complex issue to date.
Book Synopsis Texas Women by : Elizabeth Hayes Turner
Download or read book Texas Women written by Elizabeth Hayes Turner and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a collection of biographies and composite essays of Texas women, contextualized over the course of history to include subjects that reflect the enormous racial, class, and religious diversity of the state. Offering insights into the complex ways that Texas' position on the margins of the United States has shaped a particular kind of gendered experience there, the volume also demonstrates how the larger questions in United States women's history are answered or reconceived in the state. Beginning with Juliana Barr's essay, which asserts that 'women marked the lines of dominion among Spanish and Indian nations in Texas' and explodes the myth of Spanish domination in colonial Texas, the essays examine the ways that women were able to use their borderland status to stretch the boundaries of their own lives. Eric Walther demonstrates that the constant changing of governments in Texas (Spanish, Mexican, Texan, and U.S.) gave slaves the opportunities to resist their oppression because of the differences in the laws of slavery under Spanish or English or American law. Gabriela Gonzalez examines the activism of Jovita Idar on behalf of civil rights for Mexicans and Mexican Americans on both sides of the border. Renee Laegreid argues that female rodeo contestants employed a "unique regional interplay of masculine and feminine behaviors" to shape their identities as cowgirls"--
Book Synopsis Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment by : Myra C. Glenn
Download or read book Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment written by Myra C. Glenn and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1984-06-30 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Campaigns against Corporal Punishment explores the theory and practice of punishment in Antebellum America from a broad, comparative perspective. It probes the concerns underlying the naval, prison, domestic, and educational reform campaigns which occurred in New England and New York from the late 1820s to the late 1850s. Focusing on the common forms of physical punishment inflicted on seamen, prisoners, women, and children, the book reveals the effect of these campaigns on actual disciplinary practices. Myra C. Glenn also places the crusade against corporal punishment in the context of various other contemporary reform movements such as the crusade against intemperance and that against slavery. She shows how regional and political differences affected discussions of punishment and discipline.
Book Synopsis Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans by : Ashley Baggett
Download or read book Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans written by Ashley Baggett and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ashley Baggett uncovers the voices of abused women who utilized the legal system in New Orleans to address their grievances from the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth century. Poring over 26,000 records, Baggett analyzes 421 criminal cases involving intimate partner violence—physical or emotional abuse of a partner in a romantic relationship—revealing a significant demand among women, the community, and the courts for reform in the postbellum decades. Before the Civil War, some challenges and limits to the male privilege of chastisement existed, but the gendered power structure and the veil of privacy for families in the courts largely shielded abusers from criminal prosecution. However, the war upended gender expectations and increased female autonomy, leading to the demand for and brief recognition of women's right to be free from violence. Baggett demonstrates how postbellum decades offered a fleeting opportunity for change before the gender and racial expectations hardened with the rise of Jim Crow. Her findings reveal previously unseen dimensions of women's lives both inside and outside legal marriage and women's attempts to renegotiate power in relationships. Highlighting the lived experiences of these women, Baggett tracks how gender, race, and location worked together to define and redefine gender expectations and legal rights. Moreover, she demonstrates recognition of women's legal personhood as well as differences between northern and southern states' trajectories in response to intimate partner violence during the nineteenth century.
Book Synopsis An East Texas Family’s Civil War by : John T. Whatley
Download or read book An East Texas Family’s Civil War written by John T. Whatley and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-04-17 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During six months in 1862, William Jefferson Whatley and his wife, Nancy Falkaday Watkins Whatley, exchanged a series of letters that vividly demonstrate the quickly changing roles of women whose husbands left home to fight in the Civil War. When William Whatley enlisted with the Confederate Army in 1862, he left his young wife Nancy in charge of their cotton farm in East Texas, near the village of Caledonia in Rusk County. In letters to her husband, Nancy describes in elaborate detail how she dealt with and felt about her new role, which thrust her into an array of unfamiliar duties, including dealing with increasingly unruly slaves, overseeing the harvest of the cotton crop, and negotiating business transactions with unscrupulous neighbors. At the same time, she carried on her traditional family duties and tended to their four young children during frequent epidemics of measles and diphtheria. Stationed hundreds of miles away, her husband could only offer her advice, sympathy, and shared frustration. In An East Texas Family’s Civil War, the Whatleys’ great-grandson, John T. Whatley, transcribes and annotates these letters for the first time. Notable for their descriptions of the unraveling of the local slave labor system and accounts of rural southern life, Nancy’s letters offer a rare window on the hardships faced by women on the home front taking on unprecedented responsibilities and filling unfamiliar roles.
Book Synopsis Domestic Tyranny by : Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck
Download or read book Domestic Tyranny written by Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Pleck's Domestic Tyranny chronicles the rise and demise of legal, political, and medical campaigns against domestic violence from colonial times to the present. Based on in-depth research into court records, newspaper accounts, and autobiographies, this book argues that the single most consistent barrier to reform against domestic violence has been the Family Ideal--that is, ideas about family privacy, conjugal and parental rights, and family stability. This edition features a new introduction surveying the multinational and cultural themes now present in recent historical writing about family violence.
Book Synopsis Marriage on the Border by : Allison Dorothy Fredette
Download or read book Marriage on the Border written by Allison Dorothy Fredette and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not quite the Cotton Kingdom or the free labor North, the nineteenth-century border South was a land in between. Here, the era's clashing values—slavery and freedom, city and country, industry and agriculture—met and melded. In factories and plantations along the Ohio River, a unique regional identity emerged: one rooted in kinship, tolerance, and compromise. Border families articulated these hybrid values in both the legislative hall and the home. While many defended patriarchal households as an essential part of slaveholding culture, communities on the border pressed for increased mutuality between husbands and wives. Drawing on court records, personal correspondence, and prescriptive literature, Marriage on the Border: Love, Mutuality, and Divorce in the Upper South during the Civil War follows border southerners into their homes through blissful betrothal and turbulent divorce. Allison Dorothy Fredette examines how changing divorce laws in the border regions of Kentucky and West Virginia reveal surprisingly progressive marriages throughout the antebellum and postwar Upper South. Although many states feared that loosening marriage's gender hierarchy threatened slavery's racial hierarchy, border couples redefined traditionally permanent marriages as consensual contracts—complete with rules and escape clauses. Men and women on the border built marriages on mutual affection, and when that affection faded, filed for divorce at unprecedented rates. Highlighting the tenuous relationship between racial and gendered rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century, Marriage on the Border offers a fresh perspective on the institution of marriage and its impact on the social fabric of the United States.
Book Synopsis My Brother Slaves by : Sergio Lussana
Download or read book My Brother Slaves written by Sergio Lussana and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days. In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds. Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution. My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.
Book Synopsis Heartsick and Astonished by : Allison Dorothy Fredette
Download or read book Heartsick and Astonished written by Allison Dorothy Fredette and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2023-05-15 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Heartsick and Astonished features twenty-seven divorce cases from mid-nineteenth century America. More than dry legal documents, these cases provide a captivating window into marital life—and strife—in the border South during the tumultuous years before, during, and after the Civil War. Allison Dorothy Fredette has brought these primary documents to light, revealing the inner thoughts, legal hardships, and day-to-day struggles of these average citizens. In Wheeling, West Virginia, the seat of Ohio County, courtrooms bore witness to men and women from various ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds who shared shockingly intimate details of their lives and relationships. Some tried desperately to defend their masculinity or femininity; others hoped to restore their reputations to the legal system and to their community. In an era of uncertainty—when the country was torn in two, when the Wheeling community became the capital of a new state, and when activists across the country began to push for women’s rights in the household and family—the divorce cases of ordinary couples reveal changing attitudes toward marriage, gender, and legal separation in a booming border city perched on the edge of the South.
Book Synopsis Money, Marriage, and Madness by : Kim E. Nielsen
Download or read book Money, Marriage, and Madness written by Kim E. Nielsen and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2020-06-22 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna Ott died in the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane in 1893. She had enjoyed status and financial success first as a physician's wife and then as the only female doctor in Madison. Throughout her first marriage, attempts to divorce her abusive second husband, and twenty years of institutionalization, Ott determinedly shaped her own life. Kim E. Nielsen explores a life at once irregular and unexceptional. Historical and institutional structures, like her whiteness and laws that liberalized divorce and women's ability to control their property, opened up uncommon possibilities for Ott. Other structures, from domestic violence in the home to rampant sexism and ableism outside of it, remained a part of even affluent women's lives. Money, Marriage, and Madness tells a forgotten story of how the legal and medical cultures of the time shaped one woman—and what her life tells us about power and society in nineteenth century America.
Book Synopsis Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny by : Mark R. Cheathem
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny written by Mark R. Cheathem and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Jacksonian period under review in this dictionary served as a transition period for the United States. The growing pains of the republic’s infancy, during which time Americans learned that their nation would survive transitions of political power, gave way to the uncertainty of adolescence. While the United States did not win its second war, the War of 1812, with its mother country, it reaffirmed its independence and experienced significant maturation in many areas following the conflict’s end in 1815. As the second generation of leaders took charge in the 1820s, the United States experienced the challenges of adulthood. The height of those adult years, from 1829 to 1849, is the focus of the Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this era in American history.
