Constructing Gender: Sexual Slander in Nineteenth-Century America

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Social Concern ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Legal Response ◽  
The Family ◽  
Secular Society ◽  
Sexual Slander ◽  
American Society ◽  
Legal Concepts

The decades following the American Revolution witnessed major changes in American society. As traditional means of social control eroded, an increasingly secular society turned to lawmakers—both judicial and legislative—to craft new norms. Nineteenth-century legislators and judges actively promoted new visions of the economy, politics, and society. No area of social concern escaped their attention. Recent scholarship focusing on women and the family has explored how lawmakers transformed pre-Revolutionary legal concepts in reaction to changes in the nature of the family itself. This article examines the legal response in one narrow intersection of law and society: the law of sexual slander.

The Problem of Christian Unity in Early Nineteenth-Century America

1963 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lefferts A. Loetscher
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Social Challenge ◽  
Atlantic Community ◽  
Christian Unity ◽  
Aggressive Attack

American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the new Christian Review, were still building sea walls against it.

Infidel Deathbeds: Irreligious Dying and Sincere Disbelief in Nineteenth-Century America

2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 427-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley Kime
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Society

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

Emotion and Political Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Eustace
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Haitian Revolution ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
The Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines how political history is reshaped by attention to the emotions. It explores how sentiment undergirded political identities and allegiances and how emotion shaped civic memory and consciousness in revolutionary and early-nineteenth-century America. From the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution, from the rise of eighteenth-century republicanism to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, emotion proved pivotal to political change. Whether animating the spirit of freedom or sparking action on behalf of the nation, emotion was, by definition, central to patriotism in all its dynamic forms. In addition to this, the chapter also considers why emotions have been excluded from traditional political narratives.

““In Vino Veritas””: A Stoneware Jug and the Contradictions of Temperance

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-10
Author(s):  
jamie franklin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The Family ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

A large, stoneware jug in the collection of the Bennington Museum bears poignant witness to the temperance movement and contradictions inherent in Americans' attitudes towards the consumption of alcohol during the mid-nineteenth century. Made in 1859 by the Norton Stoneware Factory in Bennington, Vermont, the jug is an impressive 12 gallons in size and bears a prominent cobalt decoration depicting a compote of fruit resting on a base composed of two intertwined snakes. Above this decoration, on the jug's shoulder is a clay roundel inscribed: LUMAN P. NORTON/ 12 gals/1859/ IN VINO VERITAS. In addition to the date of manufacture and capacity, this mark notes who the jug was made for, a member of the family who owned the stoneware factory, and an interesting Latin phrase that can be translated, ““in wine [there is] truth.”” The combination of this phrase, the motif of the intertwined snakes, and Luman Preston Norton's role on Vermont's temperance movement are examined to provide a window into the conflicted attitudes about alcoholic consumption that existed in mid-nineteenth-century America and the way many tried to find a balance.

AMERICANIZATION BY CATHOLIC MEANS: FRENCH CANADIAN NATIONALISM AND TRANSNATIONALISM, 1889–1901

2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-301
Author(s):  
Patrick Lacroix
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
The North ◽  
Canadian Immigration ◽  
American Society

The age of nationalities and nationalism associated with nineteenth-century Europe also found expression in North America in the same period: French Canadians developed a national consciousness charged with a religious and providential mission. As these Canadians crossed into the United States in ever-rising numbers and established permanent “colonies” during the Gilded Age, they carried with them a cultural ideology that kept them apart from mainstream American society—and apart from their Irish American coreligionists and coworkers. Claiming the freedoms promised to them by the Constitution, these immigrants from the North battled for accommodation not only in political conventions or state legislatures, but also in the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders seemed intent on doing away with foreign languages and customs. The religious battle came to a head as lay and clerical Catholics gathered in Baltimore, in 1889, to reassert the Church's unity as well as its patriotic credentials. By drawing attention to French Canadian immigration, often overlooked in immigration studies, this article refocuses the question of Americanization on the Catholic Church, which proved one of the most powerful agents of acculturation in late nineteenth-century America.

scholarly journals Gender Issues in Freeman’s The Revolt of Mother

2021 ◽  
pp. 104-111
Author(s):  
Gobinda Puri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Gender Disparity ◽  
The Family ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
American Society

This paper analyses the gender role in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's (1890) one of the most popular short stories, The Revolt of Mother through a Marxist feminist perspective. The story depicts the gender disparity created by the patriarchal American society of the nineteenth century and the revolt of a female character, Sarah as the indication of the women's movement of 1848. The analysis of the story reveals how females are dominated and oppressed by the males in the family and also in society concerning decision-making affairs. Furthermore, it shows that if male domination and suppression continue without understanding females’ desires and fulfilling the promises made for them, they can be turned into rebellions and the traditional gender dichotomy can be broken down in a while as the protagonist appears in the story. This article also relates gender discrimination and proposes possible ways to maintain the equality and harmony between males and females concerning Nepali society.

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