Authors and Thesis Flashcards
Colonial Intimacies
Ann Marie Plane, All about English intermarriage with Indigenous women. English stressed patriarchal household. Marriage as means of colonization. 17th century, New England. Gender difference was central to conversion efforts.
Njinga of Angola
Linda Heywood. 17th and 16th century. Illustrating how diverse gender norms were in the Atlantic world Portuguese traders introduced both the tradition of male leaders and Catholicism. Njinga was able to use Catholicism as a means of increasing her power and making an alliance with the Portuguese. Frequently had her circle refer to her as a man.
Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance
David and Alexandra Cook. Peru, 16th century. Catholic Church had ultimate sway over marital affairs, and affection was paramount. A married woman’s honor was tied to her fidelity. Betrayal of marital vows meant a betrayal of the Spanish Crown.
The Ties that Buy
Ellen Hartigan O’Connor. Women were extended lines of credit, they were adept at creating market relationships and participating in the consumer revolution of 18th century American South even without the direct supervision of their supervisions. HOWEVER, men controlled capital. Women in cities less economically isolated than rural women.
Not All Wives
Karin Wulf. 18th century Philadelphia. There was a far higher percentage than expected of women who never married or were widowed. Some measure of social respect and legal independence. Certain religious sects encouraged female independence.
Slavery Unseen
Lamonte Aidoo. Mostly 19th century, Brazil. “Race was made through sex.” Black and white women’s bodies assessed for their economic value. White women’s honor entirely tied to sexuality. Inquisition documents reveal numerous accounts of same-sex violence. Catholic Church early adopted paternalistic model.
Historic Heteroessentialism
Jen Manion. Her entire argument is that historians still view homosexuality as an aberration, and we should treat heterosexuality as historically emergent, if we treat homosexuality that way.
Female Husbands: A Trans History
Jen Manion, mostly 18th/19th centuries. Gender transgression held a special social fascination. Marriage was supposed to stabilize gender and race. Community opinion was central to establishing a common understanding of sexuality and gender. Sources featured lots of caricatures and newspapers and scandalous stories.
Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France
Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick, eds. I’m going to focus on Hardwick’s chapter on witnesses, 17th century. Family at the center of French politics. Women had some institutional parity because their testimony counted the same as men.
Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic
Jennifer Palmer. There was always an intimacy to the French slave trade. White French people acknowledged the humanity of Black people as much as it could directly benefit them. 18th century, new hierarchy of power and family, with race at the core. White women’s piety contrasted with stereotypes of Black women’s promiscuity.
Meghan Vaughan
Whose Family? All about family structures in Malawi, reminder that family types are always subjective, and historians need to remember that they need to combine materiality with ideal types.
Tracy Neal Lavelle
The Catholic Rosary, Gendered Practice, and Female Power. Illini women held up as the ideal Catholic converts. 17th century Kaskaskia.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Good Wives. There are all these ideal types of women. Men were supposed to have sexual feelings, and women were supposed to regulate them. Stereotypes of women’s behavior drawn from Biblical figures. Men could use disorderly violence to reinforce class and community standards. 18th/17th century mainly. Women’s environments were the household but they were brought up in an expectation of sociability.
To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico
Patricia Seed. 17th century: Catholic Church most important in marriages. 18th century: parental approval and interference most important. Honor could be preserved even in the midst of premarital sex with a marriage promise. 18th century, marriage became far more enmeshed with male authority and economic status.
To Establish a Community of Property
John D. Garrigus. Free and wealthy people were extremely endogamous after the Haitian Revolution because they were skeptical of the preservation of anti-slavery laws. Marriage contracts–> property preservation.
Venus in Two Acts
Saidiya Hartman. Black women are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the historic record.
History Matters
Judith Bennett. Focusing on historic continuities. Lesbian-like is a designation that lets us get at LGBTQ+ ancestor histories. Patriarchy almost appears transhistorical.
Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis
Jeanne Boydston. All about getting away from an oppositional view of gender as male v. female. Wants to loosen the associations between gender and bodies and remind historians that gender is a historical process.
Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters
Sarah Pearsall. All about 18th century letter writing, a means of remaking and making family connections and expressing sensibility. Men could be affectionate, but not too feminine. Sensibility was tied up in race and class. Familiarity had to be cultivated. Enslaved Black men often used sensible language in petitions for freedom.
Portrait of A Woman in Silk
Zara Aninshanslan. 18th/19th century England North America. You can read history in material culture. Reveal distinct emerging cultures in fabric patterns. Women were producers as well as consumers. Wearing silk allowed both men and women to participate in imperial politics.
Mohawk Saint: Ann Tekakwitha
Allen Greer. 17th century, Ann is held up as the ideal Catholic convert. Group of women who routinely punished themselves for not being religious enough. Hagiography. Mostly Chaucetiere’s account of her.
Rebecca’s Revival
Jon Sensbach. 18th century. Moravians entrenched in St. Thomas. Rebecca was expected to police other enslaved people’s piety and bring them to Christianity. Moravians stressed amelioration and positioned themselves as friends of the enslaved.
Family and Sex in British Colonial India
Durba Ghosh. Englishmen were allowed access to Indian women as part of their own sense of imperial and racial superiority. Concubinage not uncommon. Sometimes mixed-race children to England for an education to be “made” English. Wills reveal how Englishmen recentered their anxieties about patriarchy in India, shifting legal agency from widows to sons. Diplomatic alliances between Company men and noblewomen.
Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest
Susan Sleeper-Smith. 18th and 19th centuries. Women were key agricultural laborers and knowledge keepers. George Washington explicitly ordered the kidnapping of women to disrupt kin and economic networks. Mistranslated French accounts often obscured the great necessity of women’s labor and respect.
Gold Coast Merchants
Randy J. Sparks. Pawning was a common practice on the Gold Coast. 18th century 17th century. Family was fungible. African corporate v. English nuclear family.
Children of the Father King
Bianca Premo. 17th/18th/19th century Peru. As the king was father, so too was the father the master of the household. Women had to adhere to strict moral standards to gain authority over children. Spanish colonial society was extremely legalistic.
He is master of his house
Nancy Christie. 18th and 19th centuries. Women and people of color mostly targeted by master-servant legislation. 1802 law strengthened control of masters over servants, husbands over wives, men over women. In counter-revolutionary Montreal
Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500-1800
Lawrence Stone. Family and household were related but not interchangeable. Honor was central to family (public reputation was everything). Privacy was a development, not a given existence. The family was representative of the state. Individualism as a male trait tied to autonomy and market growth. As marriage importance increased, so too did that of the nuclear family, thus decreasing the importance of kin.
