AHA Session 33
Thursday, January 5, 2023: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Regency Ballroom C2 (Loews Philadelphia Hotel, 2nd Foor Mezzanine)
Chair:
Kimberley A. Reilly, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay
Papers:
Comment:
Kimberley A. Reilly, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay
Session Abstract
This panel examines how women facing domestic and/or sexual violence confronted various legal standards as they sought relief through the law, in different geographcial locations across three centuries. Collectively, they highlight ways in which patriarchal assumptions, shaped by White supremacy and settler colonialism, structured the legal processes with which women might seek relief or redress. Kristin Olbertson explores how battered wives in eighteenth-century New England articulated their fear of their husbands differently than other assault victims and were held to a higher standard of proof of their fear when they brought breach of peace complaints. Lindsay Keiter finds that in South Carolina, where women could hold separate property in trust estates, wives with these marriage settlements were usually rebuffed when they sought to regain sole use of property held in trust for the couple’s joint use. Judges consistently held that even abusive men were entitled to marital property as an essential patriarchal privilege of marriage. Donna Devlin compares the different standards of corroboration in rape cases in late-nineteenth century Kansas and Nebraska to demonstrate the challenges of women seeking redress for sexual violence in the hyper-masculine Great Plains. Bringing the discussion into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Elizabeth Rule analyzes the legislative efforts and case law seeking to remedy the damage done by Canada’s 1876 Indian Act, which stripped Indigenous women who married outside of their community of their legal recognition and rights as members of the First Nations. Rule focuses on the Mohawk Council of Kahnawá:ke to examine local responses to federal efforts to remedy gender discrimination against Native women. Across these very different places and times, each panelist highlights an aspect of how women confronted legal systems structured to maintain gender hierarchy--the antecedents of the same systems women subjected to sexual and domestic violence must contend with today, with standards of evidence that create unique obstacles to remedies for gendered violence. Therefore, this panel may be of interest to historians of women/gender, the law, and violence in North America.
See more of: AHA Sessions