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Author: Robin C. Sager Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807163112 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
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.
Author: Robin C. Sager Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807163112 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 216
Book Description
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.
Author: Robin C. Sager Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 0807163120 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 272
Book Description
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.
Author: St. John Richardson Liddell Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807122181 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
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.
Author: Tera W. Hunter Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674979249 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
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
Author: Margo Mahan Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 113
Book Description
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.
Author: Emily West Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 081313692X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 246
Book Description
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.
Author: Myra C. Glenn Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 1438404190 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
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.
Author: Elizabeth Hayes Turner Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820347205 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 545
Book Description
"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"--
Author: Ashley Baggett Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi ISBN: 149681522X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
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.
Author: Robin C. Sager
Author: Robin C. Sager
Author: Robin C. Sager
Author: St. John Richardson Liddell
Author: Tera W. Hunter
Author: Margo Mahan
Author: Jen Manion
Author: Emily West
Author: Myra C. Glenn
Author: Elizabeth Hayes Turner
Author: Ashley Baggett