Estelle B. Freedman

Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930

If innate male aggression and dominance are at the root of female oppression, then the feminist program would logically require either the extermination of the offending sex, or else a eugenics project to modify its character. If sexism is a by-product of capitalisms relentless appetite for profit, then sexism would wither away in the advent of a successful socialist revolution. If the world historical defeat of women occurred at the hands of an armed

Crimes which startle and horrify: Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900

R a p e i s a t r o u b l i n g a n d e l u s i v e s u b j e c t . As a crime it has been defined in Anglo-American law as the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will (and, until recently, by a man other than her husband). Conflicting accounts of “force” and “will,” however, make rape a prime example of the difficulty of fixing “truth” in light of multiple perspectives on an event. As feminist theorist Sharon marcus has argued, rape is as much a linguistic as a physical act. The history of rape, then, consists in large part of tracking the changing cultural narratives that define which women may charge which men with the crime of forceful, unwanted sex and whose accounts will be believed. These rape narratives also have political import. In the late nineteenth-century United States, they served to shore up white male privilege through constructions of dependent women and dangerous African Americans, groups that remained excluded from full citizenship rights because of their alleged incapacity for self-government. The abundant reports of rape, outrage, ravishment, and seduction in nineteenth-century American newspapers offer rich cultural clues to the popular dissemination of these narratives of sexual violence. While recent studies of criminal justice records reveal racial patterns of prosecution and

Since Intimate Matters: Recent Developments in the History of Sexuality in the United States

Recent literature on the history of sexuality in America both confirms and complicates the interpretive framework set out in Intimate Matters twenty-five years ago. New studies reveal the ways reproduction has been highly structured by race and class. Attention to racial difference and race relations has moved from a dichotomous black and white model to multi-cultural explorations. Studies of marriage law, the construction of womanhood, the use of sexual violence, and other topics all demonstrate close connections between sexuality and racial hierarchy. Work on same-sex relations has moved beyond the largest cities and has found a variety of ways in which same-sex love has expressed itself and been understood. Increasing scholarly attention, finally, has focused on the role of the state in defining and policing the boundaries of normalcy.

Coming of age at Barnard, 1968

As part of the 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1968 student rebellion at Columbia University, Barnard College invited me to present the annual Virginia Gildersleeve Lecture on the subject “How did 1968 affect your life?” During that tumultuous year I was an undergraduate at Barnard, the womens college affiliated with Columbia and located just across Broadway on the Morningside Heights campus in New York City. Although I was only marginally involved in the protest that shut down the university, campus and national events of that year had a profound influence on me. Looking back on 1968, I can detect the seeds of both my political commitments and my subsequent career as an historian of women, feminism, and sexuality.

The Keepers and the Kept@@@Their Sisters' Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930.

This study of prison reform adds a new chapter to the history of womens struggle for justice in America