History 3349 Schedule of Lectures & Readings

HIST 3349
3 credits/Fall 2003
T/Th 12:45-2:00
HHH 35

Professor Barbara Welke
752 Social Sciences Tower
Office Hours:
T/Th. 2:15-3:30 (or by appt)
tel: (612) 624-7017
welke004@tc.umn.edu

U. S. Women's Legal History

Syllabus

Schedule

Assignments

Internet Resources

Lecture and Reading Schedule

PART I
COLONIAL AMERICA:
SUBJECTS ALL, BUT SOME MORE SUBJECT THAN OTHERS

Tues. Sept. 2 Introduction and Organization

Thurs. Sept. 4 Marriage and the Law of Coverture

Reading: 1. “Chapter The Fifteenth. Of Husband and Wife.” William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769).

Informal Writing Assignment: If you were a married woman in 17th century America, what would "coverture" have meant for your daily life? Do you see any benefits of coverture for women? How might religious belief have shaped the doctrine of coverture? (See Syllabus, Informal Writing Assignments for format, length, etc.)

Recommendations for Further Reading:

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York, 1990)

Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996)

Lisa Norling, Captain Ahab Had a Wife: New England Women and the Whalefishery, 1720-1870 (Chapel Hill, 2000).

Tues. Sept. 9 Reproductive Autonomy

Reading: Dayton, “‘Taking the Trade’: Abortion and Gender Relations in an Eighteenth-Century New England Village,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., XLVIII (1991), 19-49. (CP Doc 1)

Informal Writing Assignment: 1-2 page open topic response to the Dayton article; focus in on things of particular interest to you.

Thurs. Sept. 11 Women and the Space and Forms of the Law in Colonial America

Reading: Begin reading Taves

Informal Writing Assignment: The purpose of this assignment is to focus your attention on how historians' construct and support an argument with primary and secondary sources. Please consider the following questions regarding Dayton's article "'Taking the Trade'": (1) Does Dayton's article have a single argument or multiple arguments? List her argument(s); (2) what are her principal primary sources? (please cite specific examples and footnotes) (3) how does she use secondary sources? (please cite specific examples and footnotes); (4) Can Dayton "discover" all the answers to her questions from the available evidence? If not, how does she handle the gaps? (again cite specific examples); (5) how is her argument organized? Can you imagine other ways she might have organized it?; (6) Does the article seem effective? Why or why not?

Additional Recommended Reading:

Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, & Society in Connecticut (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).

Martha J. McNamara, From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture & Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

Tues. Sept. 16 Law and Religion: Parallel Institutions of Freedom and Constraint in Colonial America

Reading: Taves, Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England (finish).

Informal Writing Assignment: How would you assess the relative importance of law in shaping Abigail, Asa, and Phebe Bailey's options/situation? Did law occupy a more central role at some point than others? Explain.

Additional Recommended Reading:

On Divorce, see again Dayton, Women Before the Bar (above)

On Domestic Violence -

Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Linda Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives:The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

Thurs. Sept. 18 Women in Servitude and Slavery

Reading: Laws of Virginia, 1642-1705.

Informal Writing Assignment: None. Read the statutory provisions on the link, but then concentrate on thinking about your research lpaper topic!

Additional Recommended Reading:

John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

See also Kathleen Brown, Good Wives (above).

PART II
SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS:
WOMEN AND THE LAW IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA

Tues. Sept. 23 Women and Citizenship: The Conservatism of the American Revolution

Reading: Joan R. Gunderson, “Independence, Citizenship and the American Revolution,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society, vol. 13 (1987): 59-77. (CP Doc 2)

Informal Writing Assignment: (2 parts) (1) directly quote Gunderson's thesis (argument)(in other words, highlight it in the article and then put it in your paper - direct quote); (2) Was the American Revolution a revolution for women? How does thinking about women's legal status in the revolutionary era shape your understanding of the American Revolution as "radical" or "conservative"?

Due: Topic for Research Paper

Additional Recommended Reading:

Nancy Cott, “Marriage and Women’s Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934,” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1440-1474. (CP Doc 3)

Linda K. Kerber, No Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), ch. 1.

Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1986).

Thurs. Sept. 25 Law Library Tour (meet at the Reference Desk in the Law Library)

Informal Writing Assignment: Course Evaluation (distributed in class)

Tues. Sept. 30 Wilson Library Tour - – Class will meet in Wilson Library, Room S30b (sub-basement) with Rafael Tarrago for an orientation to the library and the research process.

Informal Writing Assignment: We are now moving from Part I to Part II of the course. As we do, it is important to take stock of where we've been and what you've learned. To do this, you should take an hour or two to review assigned readings, class lecture and discussion notes, and your own earlier informal writing responses. Write a two page paper (informal) reflecting on what you see as the most important elements of colonial women's legal status, how it changed (or didn't) over time, and differences among women.

Thurs. Oct. 2 Antislavery and Women's Rights

Reading: 1. Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts to Churches under Their Care, July 1837

2. Sarah Grimke: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (Response to Pastoral Letter)

Informal Writing Assignment: none

Documents from Lecture: Sarah Grimke, "Legal Disabilities of Women": Letter to Mary Parker, September 6, 1837 (published in The Liberator and in Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women (1838))

Additional Recommended Reading:

Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke, 1822-1844, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1934; reprinted Gloucester, Mass.: Smith, 1965).

Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters of North Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolitionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

Katharine DePre Lumpkin, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimke (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974).

Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women's Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement 1830-1870 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2000).

Daniel Wright, "What was the Appeal of Moral Reform to Antebellum Northern Women?" in "Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830-1930," http://womhist.binghamton.edu

Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

Tues. Oct. 7 Economic Transformation and Women’s Rights to Children

Reading: Michael Grossberg, A Judgment for Solomon: The D’Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America (entire)

Informal Writing Assignment:Did the outcome of the D'Hauteville case represent a victory for Ellen Sears D'Hauteville? For women generally? How so and how not?

Additional Recommended Reading:

Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

Thurs. Oct. 9 Women, Property, and the State in the Industrializing North

Reading:
2. “An Act for the Protection and Preservation of the rights of Married Women,” Mississippi Laws, 1839, ch. 46, p. 72.
3. “An Act for the more effectual protection of the property of married women,” Laws of the State of New York, 1848, ch. 200, p. 307.

Informal Writing Assignment: none

Question to think about for class: Did married women's property laws represent a "revolution" in women's legal status? How does the principal "subject" of the Mississippi Married Women's Property Law and reflection on what is not covered by these two laws shape your answer to this question?

Additional Recommended Reading:

1. Dianne Avery and Alfred S. Konefsky, “The Daughters of Job: Property Rights and Women’s Lives in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 10 (1992): 323-356. (CP Doc 4)

2. Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984).

Tues. Oct. 14 The Birth of the Women's Rights Movement: From Seneca Falls to Minor v. Happersett, 1848-1875

Reading: 1. “The Declaration of Sentiments” (1848).

2. The Declaration of Independence

Informal Writing Assignment: The emerging "tender years" rule which courts applied to grant child custody to women like Ellen Sears D'Hauteville rested on an assumption of the fundamental difference between men and women. How would you describe the fundamental assumption of the Seneca Falls Declaration?

Note: If you haven't read the Declaration of Independence recently, I'd recommend that you review it on the link I've provided before reading the Seneca Falls Declaration and Resolutions.

Due: Research Paper Interim Deadline (See Assignment)

Documents from Lecture:

The Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th Amendments, 1865-1870)

Bradwell v. Illinois, 16 Wall. (83 U. S.) 130 (1873).

Minor v. Happersett, 21 Wall. (88 U. S.) 162 (1875).

Additional Recommended Readings:

Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Ellen Carol DuBois, The Elizabeth Cady Stanton-Susan B. Anthony Reader: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981).

Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage & Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press, rev. ed. 1975).

Judith Wellman, "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention: A Study of Social Networks," Journal of Women's History 3 (1991): 9-37.

Thurs. Oct. 16 Emancipation, Race and the Limits of Freedom & Freedom and the Marriage Contract

Reading:

1. Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, ch. 5, pp. 175-217. (CP Doc 5)

2. Pascoe, “Race, Gender, & the Privileges of Property: On the Significance of Miscegenation Law in the U.S. West,” in Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger, eds., Over the Edge: Remapping the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): 215-230. (CP Doc 6)

Handout: “An Act concerning the rights and liabilities of husband and wife” Laws of the State of New York, 1860, ch. 90, pp. 157-159 (the New York "Earnings Law").

Additional Recommended Reading:

Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

Reva B. Siegel, "Home as Work: The First Woman's Rights Claims Concerning Wives' Household Labor, 1850-1880," The Yale Law Journal 103 (1994): 1073-1217.

Amy Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Barbara Y. Welke, "When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914," Law and History Review 13 (1995): 261-316.

Tues. Oct. 21 The Criminalization of Abortion and Birth Control

Reading: Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime, pp. 1-131 (Introduction and ch. 1-4).

Informal Writing Assignment: In her introduction and ch. 1-4 Reagan explores the criminalization of abortion and the enforcement of those laws in the years through the 1920s. I would like you to focus your informal writing here on raising questions. You should have at least five questions (but may have more!) and at least one question must relate to each ch. (and one to the introduction). Note: As a matter of equity, I would like to ask that students use only 1 of their "free" no writes on a day we are reading a book. If you did not write on Grossberg, you should write on Reagan.

Additional Recommended Reading:

Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: Birth Control in America, rev. and updated (1976; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 217-244.

See also recommended readings 10/21

Tues. Nov. 11

No Informal Writing Assignment

Due: Research Paper “Best” Draft

Thurs. Nov. 13 Peer Critique of Research Papers

Tues. Nov. 18 Seeing Discrimination

Reading: 1. NOW, Statement of Purpose

2. Kessler Harris, ch. 5-Epilogue, pp. 239-296.

Women's Right to Work Time-Line or Seeing the "gendered imaginary" at Work! ****Under Construction****

In Class Web Links: 1. Title VII, The Civil Rights Act of 1964

In Class: Watch Excerpts from Documentary "Women and Work"

Additional Recommended Readings:

Dennis Deslippe, Rights Not Roses: Women, Industrial Unions, and the Law of Equality in the United States, 1945-1980 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999).

Sally J. Kenney, For Whose Protection? Reproductive Hazards and Exclusionary Policies in the United States and Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).

Ruth Milkman, "Women's History and the Sears ase," Feminist Studies 12 (Summer 1986): 375-400.

Pauli Murray and Mary O. Eastwood, "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII," George Washington Law Review 34 (1965): 232-256.

Melvin Urofsky, Affirmative Action on Trial: Sex Discrimination in Johnson v. Santa Clara (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997).

Thurs. Nov. 20 The Equal Protection Revolution: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the ACLU Women’s Rights Project

Reading: 1. Jane S. DeHart, “From Frontiero to Flatbush with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” ch. 4-6 (DeHart is currently completing a book on Ginsburg's leadership of the ACLU Women's Rights Project to be published by Knopf in 2005).
2. Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U. S. 677 (1973).
3. Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636 (1975).

Informal Writing Assignment: Your response should take the form of a letter to Professor DeHart and should do the following: (1) Identify what you see as her main point in each chapter and consider how successfully you think that point comes across at this stage of her writing; (2) Raise questions for her about the chapters; and (3) Based on your reading of the excerpts from the Supreme Court's decisions in Frontiero and Wiesenfeld, what questions would you hope Professor DeHart's book on Ginsburg would address. What questions generally do you have about these two decisions?

In Class: Watch Excerpts from Ruth Bader Ginsburg Confirmation Hearings

Tues. Nov. 25 Sexual Harassment: Right and Reality

Reading: Bingham & Gansler, Class Action, Part I, 3-135

Informal Writing Assignment: Why did women first go to work in the Eveleth mines in 1975? Who were these women (in a general sense) and why did they want these jobs? How does their experience shape your understanding of sexual harassment? What are the challenges (practical, personal, contractual (union), and legal) to their bringing a claim of sexual harassment?

Additional Recommended Reading:

Kimberle Crenshaw, "Whose Story is it Anyway? Feminist and Antiracist Appropriations of Anita Hill." In Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

Jane Flax, The American Dream in Black and White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

Anita Faye Hill and Emma Coleman Jordan, eds., Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

The Complete Transcripts of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings, Oct. 11, 12, 13, 1991 ed. by Anita Miller (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1994).

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment of Working Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Gwendolyn Mink, Hostile Environment: The Political Betrayal of Sexually Harassed Women (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).

Thurs. Nov. 27 No Class – Thanksgiving

Tues. Dec. 2 Sexual Harrassment: Right and Reality, cont.

Reading: Bingham & Gansler, Class Action, Part II, 139-385

Informal Writing Assignment: 2 parts.

1. Rights? At What Cost? Is this a useful book to read in working to understand what it means to have rights and recognition of sexual harassment in the law, in particular? How does learning about the legal process shape your understanding of what it meant to these women in particular, and to women more generally to have a right to a workplace free from sexual harassment? How much time passed between when Lois Jenson first files suit and when the case is finally resolved? What toll does the case take, both on the female lawyers involved and the women miners involved in the suit? What do you take away from reading this book along with the narrative in Leslie Reagan's, When Abortion Was a Crime, about law in action as opposed to law on the books?

2. On Tuesday, Carolyn Chalmers, a noted Minnesota employment discrimination lawyer will spend part of class talking about her career and answering our questions. Ms. Chalmers graduated from the Univ. of Minnesota Law School in 1977 and practiced employment discrimination law for 17 years, including extensive experience in sex discrimination, sexual harassment and academic employment litigation. Please have three questions that you'd like to ask her about sex discrimination suits in the 1980s, including the Jenson case.

One of the cases Carolyn Chalmers will discuss on Tuesday is her role as lead counsel in a sexual harassment case in a University setting: Jean Y. Jew, M.D. v. The University of Iowa. The suit took place over the same time frame as the Jenson case, involved the same kind of protracted refusal of the insitution (her a university rather than a mining company) to acknowledge a wrong, and also ended in a legal victory for the plaintiff. You can read more about the case in the following (this is not assigned reading -- just here for you to follow up with if you'd like!):

Jew v. University of Iowa, 749 F. Supp 946 (S.D. Iowa 1990).

Martha Chamallas, "Jean Jew's Case: Resisting Sexual Harassment in the Academy," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 6 (1994): 71-90.

Celia Morris, Bearing Witness: Sexual Harassment and Beyond--Everywoman's Story (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 128-139.

Thurs. Dec. 4 The New Poor: Women, Children, Divorce, and Welfare Reform

Reading: Felicia Kornbluh, “To Fulfill Their ‘Rightly Needs’: Consumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement,” Radical History Review 69 (1997): 76-113. (CP Doc 8)

Additional Recommended Readings:

Mary Jo Bane, "Politics and Policies of the Feminization of Poverty," in Margaret Weir et al., The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Martha F. Davis, Brutal Need: Lawyers and the Welfare Rights Movement, 1960-1973 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: The Free Press, 1994).

Sylvia Law, "Women, Work, Welfare and the Preservation of Patriarchy," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 131 (May 1983): 1249-1339.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

Glenda Riley, Divorce - An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

Tues. Dec. 9 Research Paper: Class Presentations

Thurs. Dec. 11 Research Paper: Class Presentations

Due: Research Paper in Final Form