September 28, 2007—Recovering the 1950s: Women's Political Hopes in the Lost Decade
Christine Stansell, University of Chicago

The paper is an excerpt from the book I am finishing, a history of feminism, 1792-2002. Looking at a variety of women’s activities in the US and sketching a range of opinion about women, I describe the period as one when more post-war hopes for a part in politics survived that is commonly thought. The section ends with a discussion of De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and the surprisingly hospitable reception it received in the early 1950s.

October 12, 2007—Rescuing Recy: Race, Rape, and Justice in Alabama
Theresa Napson-Williams, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

In 1944, the rape of Recy Taylor, a young black woman, by a group of white men in Abbeville, Alabama received national attention. Taylor’s story reveals much about race and gender relations as well as the power dynamics at work within the political and legal systems. Instead of an isolated case of rape, the case became the test of Alabama and America’s fundamental commitment to democracy and justice. It also reified a standard that required rape victims to demonstrate utmost morality and to exhibit the characteristics of ideal women.

December 14, 2007—Women Unfit for Property: Gender, Disability, and the Legally Incompetent Female
Kim Nielsen, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay

While historians know that race diminished the guarantees of the women’s property laws passed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, we know little about the threat of legal incompetency and guardianship that also often complicated women’s control of property. This paper examines women determined incompetent to fulfill the citizenship task of property ownership by Wisconsin county courts from the 1860s to WWII. My project uses age, race, marital status, mental, and bodily abilities to examine those defined as incompetent citizens, a category whose boundaries are often erroneously considered unchanging and unaffected by changing social structures.

January 11, 2008—Cohabitation and Small Town America in 1971
Elizabeth Pleck, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This paper examines the persecution of a cohabiting couple in Southern Wisconsin in 1971. The sexual revolution always had a powerful geographic dimension, between what was acceptable in cities and what was acceptable in small towns where sexual morality was enforced and policed. Small town America was the battleground for differing views about cohabitation in the 1970s. Cohabitation was stigmatized behavior, behavior that shamed and discredited the person in the eyes of the community. The stigma of cohabitation was enforced through the intervention of neighbors, the press, public employers, the police and the courts. In this particular case the major victim was not a woman but a man because he was a public employee who worked directly with youth.

February 8, 2008—Consolidating the Patriarchal City: Gender Ideals and the Transformation of the Built Environments of Chicago, Dublin, London, and Toronto from the 1870s into the 1940s
Maureen Flanagan, Michigan State University

This paper investigates the ideas and means by which the built environments of “modernizing” Chicago, Dublin, London, and Toronto were constructed, concretely, to reinforce socially-constructed ideas of gender. These cities belonged to an industrial Anglo-Atlantic world experiencing growing urban chaos. New planning professionals such as Patrick Geddes, Raymond Unwin, Thomas Adams, and John Nolen engaged in a transatlantic sharing of ideas, reports, and plans that proposed a reformed urban model that paid no attention to women’s ideas as it sought to clearly separate the productive and reproductive spaces of the city.

March 14, 2008—Women’s Internationalism and Orientalism: The Indochinese Women’s Conferences of 1971
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Ohio State University

In April of 1971, hundreds of female activists throughout North America gathered in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada to attend the Indochinese Women’s Conferences (IWC). The conference offers an opportunity to analyze the opportunities for and obstacles against the formation of multi-racial and transnational alliances, i.e. “global sisterhood.” The paper will focus in particular around the conflicts that emerged during the conferences concerning race, sexuality, and nationality. North American women of varying racial backgrounds exhibited what I characterize as a radical orientalist sensibility. Through travel, correspondence, and meetings, they learned to regard Asian female liberation fighters, especially from Viet Nam, as exemplars of revolutionary womanhood. These idealized projections countered classical orientalist depictions of exotic, sexualized, and victimized Asian women. Nevertheless, these radical portrayals tended to serve an orientalist purpose by representing a contrasting image to western women’s critiques of gender roles in North American societies. The dichotomy between the oppression that they identified in the West and the revolutionary hope that they perceived in the East helped North American women to redefine their own identities and political goals.

April 11, 2008—Sibling Politics: Birth Order, Gender, and Marital Status in Eighteenth-Century England
Amy Harris, Brigham Young University

Sibling politics occupied a unique space in eighteenth-century England–a space defined by a contradiction: brothers and sisters were described as equal and simultaneously taught to accept the inequalities of their resources and experiences. In other words siblings had to negotiate a hierarchy of equality. Using a case study of the Travell family this paper explores that hierarchy of equality that shaped sibling power and its manifestations within households. Gender, birth order, and marital status were the conduits of sibling power and they were manifested in the governance of households (both real and fictive).

May 9, 2008—“One of the Best Loved, North and South”: The Appropriation of National Reconciliation by LaSalle Corbell Pickett
Caroline Janney, Purdue University

In recent years, scholars have acknowledged that LaSalle Pickett was largely responsible for transforming her husband’s reputation from that of an incompetent officer into that of a Confederate hero. This perspective, however, has led many to overlook LaSalle’s most important role: as a central figure in the larger narrative of national reconciliation in the years after the Civil War. In straddling the worlds of the federal bureaucracy, literature, stage performances, and veteran reunion culture, Pickett simultaneously contributed to both national reconciliation and the Lost Cause. She did so, however, primarily to maintain her own financial and social independence. She thus served as a rare and perhaps the only female example of a middle-ground between Lost Cause advocates and reconciliationists.

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