Kornhauser on Women, Lobbying and Tax, 1924-1936

Marjorie E. Kornhauser, Tulane University School of Law, has posted a draft of her book, American Voices in a Changing Democracy: Women, Lobbying, and Tax, 1924-1936, chapter by chapter, on SSRN.  We’re posting the abstract for the Introduction.  Click on the titles for abstracts for the other chapters.

Introduction

This ... introduces my book American Voices in a Changing Democracy: Women, Lobbying, and Tax, 1924-1936. The book focuses on the intersection of three areas of change in a time of great change: the role of women, the role of lobbying (broadly defined), and the role of taxation. These areas are once again in flux today. Each area is important in itself and each underwent significant change during this time period that affected important aspects of American life. Combined, the three areas illuminate the interrelated nature of society, economics, government and politics.

The book is not about lobbying, women, or taxation per se, but about the intersection of these three elements in a period of generally rapid change. Each element is important to democracy and each underwent great changes during the relevant years. Viewing the interaction of the three elements provides not just insight into each strand but expands our knowledge of democracy’s responses to change in an era similar to our current times in many ways: rapid technological change, demographic changes, economic stresses, and political change.

Tax-phobic readers should rest easy. The book is not about substantive tax; rather it uses tax as a medium to examine women and lobbying. Consequently, readers need not know any tax—or even be all that interested in tax. The book contains no technical tax or substantive tax policy. Rather, it concerns one aspect of the social construction of tax policy: the influence of mid-level lobbying on public opinion regarding taxes as manifest from one perspective—women’s political action. All the reader needs to know by way of background about taxes, is found in Part D of Chapter I. Although the tax-aholic will be unable to satisfy a technical tax thirst, the tax-ophile will still find a satisfying feast of material about the central role taxation plays in America.

This Introduction lays out the scope, purpose and organization of the book. It sets the stage by briefly describing the changing technology, culture and government that underlay the changes affecting women, tax and lobbying. It proceeds to explain the choice of the time period and concludes with a note about research techniques.

1.  Changing Times: Lobbying and Taxation 1924-1936

2.  Women, Women’s Clubs, Women’s Political Activity and Lobbying Generally: 1924-1936
     [The post on SSRN notwithstanding, this is indeed Chapter 2]

3.  Women's Tax Lobbying: 1924–1936

4.  Conservative Women’s Groups and Tax Lobbying

5.  Cathrine Curtis and the Women Investors in America

--Dan Ernst

Siegel on the 19th Amendment Now

Neil Siegel, Duke University School of Law, has posted Why the Nineteenth Amendment Matters Today: A Citizen's Guide for the Centennial:

Susan B. Anthony (LC)

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth
Amendment to the United States Constitution, a radically pro-democratic amendment that empowered roughly ten million women to vote in a general election for the first time. Given the practical and expressive significance of the Amendment, it is appropriate that the United States is honoring the occasion. But Americans might do more than honor their shared past. They might be encouraged to think about why the story of the Nineteenth Amendment matters to Americans living today. That story includes a half-century of social movement contestation over whether permitting women to vote would destroy or democratize the American family and the American constitutional structure. This Essay revisits the story of the Nineteenth Amendment—an unfinished narrative of both disappointment and hope—in the service of identifying reasons why that story relates to the lives of contemporary Americans. Its overarching objective is to suggest that the full story of the Amendment has always involved much more than a narrow debate over a determinate decision rule regarding women’s access to the franchise. To accomplish that objective, the Essay makes four points in four parts. The first two explain when and how voting rights for all women slowly became a reality, and the final two identify some implications of that history for American constitutional law and contemporary constitutional politics.

Part I considers which women were enfranchised when and why it matters. Part II considers some of the groups (men) and structures (federalism) that both impeded and facilitated woman suffrage. Part III explains the link between restrictions on woman suffrage and the social subordination of women to men, showing how the anti-subordination rationale of the Nineteenth Amendment bears on both its own interpretation and the interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause by the courts. Part IV turns to the contemporary implications of the story of the Nineteenth Amendment for American constitutional politics, including debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, unequal pay for equal work, paid family and self-care leave, and restrictions on access to contraception and abortion.

–Dan Ernst

The Strange Symbiosis of Libel and the Popular Press

My thanks once more for the opportunity to be your guest blogger this month. This will be my final post.

The Strange Symbiosis of Libel and the Popular Press

In late 1920, London daily newspapers had a field day recounting the scene before the King’s Bench and a special jury. A slander case pitted writer Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall against St. George Lane Fox-Pitt, son of famed archeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers. Fox-Pitt had recently learned from Admiral Troubridge that Radclyffe-Hall had taken up with the Admiral’s estranged wife. Fox-Pitt used this information to discredit Radclyffe-Hall at the Society of Psychical Research, purportedly calling her a “grossly immoral woman.” In court, Fox-Pitt denied that he had ever called the plaintiff “immoral.” Or, he equivocated, if he had done so, he had not meant it maliciously. Indeed, if he meant it at all, the claim pertained to her work, not to Radclyffe-Hall herself. According to the Daily Mirror, the courtroom burst into laughter as Fox-Pitt attempted to describe the immorality implicit in Radclyffe-Hall’s psychic account of a “spook horse” bathing in heaven. Not even the judge seemed able to move past the strangeness of spiritualist study to follow Fox-Pitt’s point [1]. Radclyffe-Hall won her slander suit, receiving £500 damages, a decision upheld on appeal in 1921 [2]. She won thanks to the little-known 1891 Slander of Women Act that allowed women (and only women) in England and Wales to sue for sexual slander without having to prove damages. The law would remain on the books until 2013.

I have been thinking quite a bit about this Act since starting research on reputation. It gets mentioned regularly in legal primers as one of the few caveats in British defamation law. Whereas the law generally requires proof of financial damages in cases of oral slander, the 1891 Act exempted women, since the quintessential middle-class Victorian woman presumably had no market income to lose. There are only a few hits when one searches for cases in the law reports, not leaving the historian much to draw from. If one shifts one’s view from law reports to the newspapers, however, one finds several dozen cases over the law’s 122-year life, the bulk of them taking place between its 1891 passage and 1940. With each expansion of the online British Newspaper Archive, I find more. Some of the stories are set up as general-interest stories, while other slander of women cases were less visible. Editors clearly deemed Radclyffe-Hall’s trial to be good entertainment for readers, and covered it on the first or second pages of their papers.   

As a historical repository of courtroom drama, newspapers are unparalleled sources. But they are far from being neutral parties, of course. It is perhaps hard to find an area of research in which this is more the case than in questions surrounding defamation. Members of the press were outspoken in their critique of libel law at every stage. Nevertheless, journalist critics of libel laws rarely advocated the outright abolition of defamation law. Radclyffe-Hall’s case and Kelly v. Sherlock (see my previous post) offer useful ways of thinking about newspapers’ relationship with defamation cases and how historians might take the relationship into account.

Radclyffe-Hall’s case was a society case. It was entertaining, and it would sell well. Thanks to amendments to the libel laws in the 1880s, news outlets could report on court proceedings so long as the reporting was done accurately and without malice. Targeting an ever-wider readership, especially among women, mass newspapers could bank on the appeal of a social celebrity like Radclyffe-Hall. The seeming ridiculousness of the whole affair likely made the courtroom drama all the more appealing. The laughter in the courtroom stood in for newspaper editorializing, which would have been off limits—or, rather, open to libel charges in turn. Indeed, the entire scene underscores an implicit agreement about the bounds of civility in the period. It was permissible to laugh at Fox-Pitt for his unchivalrous and inept condemnation of Radclyffe-Hall. His inhibitions about addressing her sexuality in the courtroom can be attributed to the Slander of Women Act’s blanket prohibition on criticism of a woman’s virtue. But the courtroom and wider public also seemed remarkably at ease with Radclyffe-Hall’s well-known lesbianism a decade before she published her seminal (and censored) Well of Loneliness. It helped, of course, that the case involved a psychical society, not politics; the stakes were lower. This could not be said about Kelly v. Sherlock. 

Sherlock got into trouble not because he published about Kelly but because of the manner in which he discussed Kelly. Kelly was indeed fair game. He’d made himself a target of public interest, as Baron Bramwell ruled in the trial at the Manchester assizes in August 1865. While there might be a privilege in sermonizing to one’s flock (Bramwell was doubtful, but upheld it), there was no pastoral privilege to criticize civil officials. By so doing, Bramwell held, Kelly opened himself to public rebuke [3]. Sherlock’s infraction, then, was not criticizing Kelly, but doing so in an overly vitriolic manner. It was a contemptuous attack on his professional persona. Newspapers that reported on Kelly and Sherlock could do so without feeling that they were betraying their profession or inviting trouble themselves because, to them, the case helped clarify the boundaries of legitimate journalistic practice. Journalists were not unqualified defenders of journalistic latitude, and saw no reason to be so. They were comfortable with a legally-enforced code of journalistic civility.

It is significant when even those with an interest in criticizing a norm assent to it in principle, since this reflects the power of a social norm. On my bus ride home today, I was reading the 1967 Report of the Joint Committee on Censorship of the Theatre. In his testimony to the committee, Kenneth Tynan, then fighting to have Hochhuth’s Soldiers staged, demanded the end of censorship. His phrasing early in his testimony is of note: “there should be no restriction short of libel on the presentation of historical characters living or dead” [4]. 

[1] Daily Express, November 19, 1920, p. 1; Daily Mirror, November 19, 1920, p. 2. 

[2] "Court of Appeal." Times, March 16, 1921, p. 5.

[3] 686 Kelly v Sherlock, Queen's Bench Division, 13 June 1866, (1865-66) L.R. 1 Q.B. 686, 689.

[4] Testimony of Kenneth Tynan January 24, 1967, as found in the Minutes of Evidence appended to the Joint Committee on Censorship of the Theatre, p. 80.

--Caroline Shaw

CFP: The 15th and 19th Amendments

[We have the following announcement.]

Massachusetts Historical Society.  Call for Papers for the 2020 Conrad E. Wright Research Conference.  “Shall Not Be Denied”: The 15th and 19th Amendments at the Sesquicentennial and Centennial of their Ratifications, October 16-17, 2020.  Deadline: November 1, 2019.

The year 2020 marks the anniversaries of two critical amendments to the United States Constitution. Spaced fifty years apart, the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, ratified in 1870 and 1920, respectively, prohibited the use of race or sex to deny American citizens the franchise. However, the amendments did not prevent states from adopting other methods of discrimination. Viewed as the product of two different movements—abolitionism and the Civil War on the one hand and the Progressive campaigns and the First World War on the other—these two periods and amendments are not often considered together. This conference revisits the long journey to secure voting rights for African Americans and women in United States history. It considers the legal precedents and hurdles that each amendment faced, the meaning and uneven outcomes of each, the social context that allowed for ultimate ratification, the role of key individuals and groups in these respective contexts, and how each amendment has been remembered over time.

This conference invites scholars from various disciplines to discuss common themes and challenges surrounding the amendments and papers can cover any topic relating to them. We welcome submissions from all historical, political science, and legal fields.

A keynote panel and reception will take place on Friday, 16 October. The panel features Profs. Alison M. Parker (University of Delaware) and Lisa Tetrault (Carnegie Mellon University) and will be moderated by Prof. Alex Keyssar (Harvard). The full conference day will take place on Saturday, 17 October.

Interested parties are encouraged to submit either individual paper presentations or full panels (with or without commenters) by November 1, 2019. Application materials must include a paper description and CV for individual submissions. Full panel proposals must include paper descriptions and individual CVs along with a description of the panel itself. Paper proposals should not exceed one page and accompanying CVs should not exceed ten pages in length. Please submit applications materials and/or questions to research@masshist.org.

[--Dan Ernst.  H/t: LES]

Weekend Roundup

• On the New Books Network, Derek Litvak, a Ph.D. student in the department of history at the University of Maryland, interviews Matthew Crow, Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, about his book Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection (Cambridge University Press, 2017). 

• On September 3, the 124th anniversary of his birth, the Harvard Law School held a symposium on Charles Hamilton Houston.  A full report in Harvard Law Today and a link to a recording of the symposium are here.

• Thanks to Brian L. Frye, we just noticed the open source casebook Legal History: History of American Economic Regulation (Spring 2015), by Kenneth Mack, Harvard Law School, who happens to have been one of the speakers at the aforementioned symposium.

• We note belatedly that the Wheeling Academy of Law and Science Foundation and other sponsors held the symposium "Women in Labor History” last weekend in Wheeling, WV.

• ICYMI: John Locke on “Reasons for Tolerateing [sic] Papists Equally with Others" (WSJ via HNN).  John Fabian Witt on Tony Kronman on renaming Yale's Calhoun College and Kronman's response (Yale Daily News).  William Dalrymple in the NYT on the East India Company as The Original Evil Corporation.   Colin Gordon, University of Iowa, in the Jacobin on The New Deal State and Segregation.

• In WaPo’s “Made by History,” Jamie Pietruska, Rutgers University, on Why President Trump’s Sharpied weather map was likely a crime--and should be.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• Congratulations to Sarah Barringer Gordon and Kevin Waite, both of the University of Pennsylvania, on their award of a $242,000 collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support a project titled "The Long Road to Freedom: Biddy Mason (1818–1891) and the Making of Black Los Angeles."

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Adam Malka (University of Oklahoma) on "Why law enforcement has a blind spot for white male violence"; Hidetaka Hirota (Waseda University) on "The danger of vilifying poor immigrants"; Salonee Bhaman (Ph.D. candidate, Yale University) on "How President Trump’s new immigration rule could erode the social safety net"; Margaret Marsh (Rutgers University) and Wanda Ronner (Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania) on "Why new anti-abortion laws may make it harder to conceive"; Katherine M. Marino (University of California, Los Angeles) on "How Mike Pompeo’s new commission on ‘unalienable rights’ butchers history"; Faith Hillis (University of Chicago) on "Why trying to distinguish between useful and dangerous immigrants always backfires"; and more.

• Writing for JOTWELLs Constitutional Law section, Ilya Somin has posted an admiring review of Maureen E. Brady's recent article on damagings clauses.

• Over at In Custodia Legis, an appreciation for equal rights crusader Maggie Kuhn; the long struggle for Swiss women's suffrage.   

• Harvard Law Today has a story on how students in Elizabeth Papp Kamali’s seminar, "Mind and Criminal Responsibility in the Anglo-American Tradition," use crime broadsides and other original sources in the Harvard Law School Library's Historical & Special Collections.

• Princeton Alumni Weekly has posted a podcast with Sarah Seo on her book Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

• The Supreme Court Historical Society and production company Article III Films have announced the launch of the web documentary FDR and the Courtpacking Controversy.  “In late August the documentary will be sent to U.S. History teachers across the nation, accompanied by specially designed lesson plans to help students learn about the Courtpacking episode, which highlights important issues about separation of powers.”

• Now available on-line from the American Journal of Legal History: The Development of the ‘Modern’ Criminal Law of Evidence in English Law and in France, Germany and the Netherlands: 1750–1900, by R G Bloemberg.

• 1619: The 400th anniversary of the start of African American slavery in what is now the United States of America is the subject of the 1619 Project of the New York Times Magazine and this timeline in The Guardian.  But the History Channel says it started earlier.

• ICYMI: Immigration edition.  Erika Lee on the legal history of the new "public charge" regulation.  Also Kunal Parker, on NPR.  Mother Jones thinks Acting Director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli’s ancestor might have been excluded under it.

• Have you checked out the Federal Judicial Center's Famous Federal Trials lately? 

• Margaret O'Mara, the Howard & Frances Keller Professor of History at the University of Washington, will be delivering the keynote at the Policy History Conference in June 2020.  The PHC is currently accepting submissions of panels and papers.

• Now out in paperback:Women's Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland (Hart), edited by Erika Rackley and Rosemary Auchmuty.

• Update: LHB blogger Mitra Sharafi's post for India's Independence Day (Aug.15) on how one law journal survived the partition of British India

• Update: Check out the Teaching Law and Religion Case Study Archive by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd. Lots of legal history here!

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

The Constitutional Legacy of Seneca Falls

Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony (LC)

The Constitutional Legacy of Seneca Falls, a podcast of the National Constitution Center, is now available.  It “explores what happened at the historic convention, and how its legacy shaped the Constitution through the fight for women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment and, later, landmark gender equality and reproductive rights cases, including Roe v. Wade.” With Erika Bachiochi, Ethics & Public Policy Center, and Tracy A. Thomas, University of Akron School of Law.  Hosted by Jeffrey Rosen.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• Advance alerts from Law and History Review and Cambridge Core: Originalism and the Academy in Exile, by Paul Baumgardner, and Trial without Jury in Guam, USA, by Katherine Unterman.

• New in the Juridical Review: Andrew Simpson, Men of Law in the Aberdeen Council Register? A Preliminary Study, Circa 1450-1460.

• Ellen M. Gilmer, E&E News, reports on that historical reargument of Chevron, sponsored by the the Historical Society of the DC Circuit.

• OUP and CUP would like to know what scholarly monographs mean to academic researchers, readers and authors.

• The Department of American Indian Studies, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota invites applications for a full-time faculty position (open rank, tenured or tenure-track) beginning fall semester 2020.  The announcement is here.

• “Luisa M. Kaye, daughter of Judith S. Kaye, former Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, discusses the autobiography she co-edited about her mother's life and career and reveals the personal moments that shaped her judicial philosophy.”  NYSBA.

• New From Edward Elgar: Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Comparative Analysis and Critique, ed. Helena Alviar García, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia, and Günter Frankenberg, Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.  “The contributions to this book analyse and submit to critique authoritarian constitutionalism as an important phenomenon in its own right, not merely as a deviant of liberal constitutionalism.”

• ICYMI: Princeton announces that Dirk Hartog has gone emeritus; HLS announces that Laura Weinrib is joining its faculty.   Four women, four lawyers: How a Fond du Lac family made law history before they could vote (Fond du Lac Reporter). More on legal historians as First Gentlemen (or whatever), here and here.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Weekend Roundup

• The University of Chicago Law School has posted the video of Why Madison Matters: Rethinking Democracy in America,”  this year’s Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lectureship in Legal History, delivered by James T. Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.   As the Law School’s website reports, “Drawing from Madison's writings along with those of other founding fathers, including James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, Kloppenberg suggested that they aimed not merely to balance competing interests but to pursue what Madison called ‘justice and the general good.’”  

• Congratulations to recent Guest Blogger Sarah Seo for the inclusion of Policing the Open Road in the New Yorker’s What We’re Reading This Summer!

• Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote, an exhibit at the Library of Congress, runs through September 2020

• The Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin invites graduate student submissions for the sixth annual Graduate Conference in Public Law, to be held October 24-25, 2019.  Among the contemplated submissions are papers on "Constitutional or Political Development."  Julie Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY, who writes at the intersection of law, history, US Political Development, and subordinated identities, will deliver the keynote.

• Call for Papers: Law and Governance of a Global City: 17th-Century Amsterdam," June 2020.  "Four hundred years ago, like today, globalisation and urbanisation impacted the world’s cities. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the afflux of trade and migrants prompted rapid economic and demographic growth, resulting in dynamic multicultural urban life and leading to complex questions of governance."  H/t: JG.

• ICYMI: Will Baude on originalism in the Volokh Conspiracy.  

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

AALS CFP: Century of Woman Suffrage

[We have the following CFP.]

The AALS Section on Legal History is pleased to announce a call for papers for its section program, which will be held during the 2020 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The program is entitled “A Century of Women’s Suffrage.”

2020 marks one hundred years since the 19th Amendment was ratified, ushering in the last century of women’s suffrage in the United States. This program will bring together scholars writing on the history of women’s suffrage, broadly construed. Submissions should relate to any aspect of women’s suffrage, including exploring the suffrage movement that culminated in the 19th Amendment, addressing how the 19th Amendment affected political parties or politics in the subsequent century, and comparing the women’s suffrage movement to analogous social movements.

Eligibility and Submission Requirements: This Call for Papers is open to all faculty members from AALS member schools. Submissions should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. You may submit a CV as well, but are not required to do so.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation as a panelist, please email a copy of your submission to Evan Zoldan at evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu by July 31, 2019. Participants will be selected by the Legal History section executive committee and will be notified by September 1, 2019.

Questions: If you have any questions about the panel, please contact Evan Zoldan at evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu.  A link to the CFP can be found on the AALS website, here.

---Dan Ernst

Gaius and Jane Bolin

[My exam in American Legal History also includes a biographical essay.  Usually (as here and here), it treats only a single person.  I intended to do the same this year when, prompted by an event sponsored by the Black Law Students’ Association at the Yale Law School, I decided to see whether Jane Bolin would be a good subject.  Jacqueline A. McLeod’s Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin (University of Illinois Press) certainly showed that she would be, but it also gave an intriguing view of her father Gaius Bolin, so I opted for a joint essay.  Daughter of the Empire State is my principal source for this essay, augmented by Kenneth Mack’s discussion of Jane Bolin in Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (Harvard University Press), and my own searches on newspapers.com.  In addition to the linked images, be sure to check out the picture of daughter and father during Jane Bolin’s return to Poughkeepsie in 1944 that Professor McLeod reproduces in her book.  Dan Ernst]

Quinn on a "Fallen" Woman Judge

Mae C. Quinn, University of Florida Levin College of Law, has posted Fallen Woman (Re)framed: Judge Jean Hortense Norris, New York City - 1912-1955, which is forthcoming in the University of Kansas Law Review 67 (2019): 451-512:

Jean H. Norris (wiki)

This Article seeks to surface and understand more than what is already known about Jean Hortense Norris as a lawyer, jurist, and feminist legal realist—as well as a woman for whom sex very much became part of her professional persona and work. This article analyzes the lack of legal protections provided to Norris and troubling nature of her removal from the bench given the evidence presented and standards applied. Finally, this Article seeks to provide further context for Jean Norris’s alleged misconduct charges to suggest that as a woman who dared to blur gender boundaries, embrace her professional power, and offer a unique vision of the “fairer sex,” she was held to a different standard than her male peers and made to pay the price with her career. In these ways, this Article provides a more complete picture of Jean Norris beyond a shamed and disrobed judge. And it begins to move Judge Norris out of legal history’s margins so that she may be remembered as more than mere mugshot in the American imagination.

--DRE

Thomas on the 19th Amendment and Pay Equity

Tracy A. Thomas, University of Akron School of Law, has posted More than the Vote: The Nineteenth Amendment as Proxy for Gender Equality, which is forthcoming in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (2019):

The original idea behind the Nineteenth Amendment was never just about the vote. Instead, the first women's rights movement 175 years ago, like the modern movement for the Equal Rights Amendment, sought comprehensive equality for women in all avenues of life. The constitutional text for women’s full equality and emancipation has changed over the centuries; first embodied in the grant of the vote as a proxy for structural change, and now incorporated into the demand for “equal rights.” Yet women have been consistent over time in understanding the radical idea that systems of governance, family, industry, and church need dismantling and reconstructing in order to support women’s equality and emancipation.

This paper first details the origins of women’s political demand for the vote as part of a comprehensive social reform. It then discusses the four strands of the comprehensive early women’s rights agenda for gender equality focused on the political state, domestic family, economic industry, and religious church. Finally, it connects the suffrage activism with demands for an equal rights amendment to realize the full civil rights of equality envisioned by and for women.

This long view of women’s rights shows that the movement was not solely about suffrage, but that the vote stood as a shorthand for a complete revolution of the interlocking systems supporting women’s oppression and denying women equal rights. The legal history illustrates that “women’s rights” has always been a multiple issue, multiple systems platform, even as certain issues like suffrage or abortion have been isolated in the dominant public discourse, often driven there by opponents of gender equality. Appreciating the context and constitutional history of the Nineteenth Amendment supports a more robust understanding of constitutional guarantees of gender equality today, supporting interpretations of “equal protection” under the Fourteenth Amendment to encompass the full array of public and private rights.

 --DRE

Legal Histories and Legacies of the 19th Amendment

[Here's word of a conference at Stanford Law.]

Legal Histories and Legacies of the 19th Amendment: A Conference in Anticipation of the Amendment’s Centennial.  Stanford Center for Law and History.  Closing Reception Sponsored by the Stanford Law Library. 

Friday, May 3, 2019, Stanford Law School

Breakfast for Conference Participants and Attendees, 9:00 – 9:30 AM

Movements for Suffrage and Office Holding, 9:30 – 11:15 AM
    • Chair: Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School
    • Rabia Belt, Stanford Law School
    • Thomas Dublin, Binghamton University History Department
    • Elizabeth Katz, Stanford Law School
    • Bertrall Ross, Berkeley Law School

Immigration & Family Citizenship, 11:30 – 1:00 PM
    • Chair: Nancy F. Cott, Harvard University History Department
    • Felice Batlan, Chicago-Kent College of Law
    • Kristin Collins, Boston University School of Law
    • Hardeep Dhillon, Harvard University History Department

Lunch for Conference Participants and Attendees, 1:00 – 2:15 PM

Post-Suffrage Struggles for Women’s Legal Equality, 2:15–3:45 PM
    • Chair: Richard Ford, Stanford Law School
    • Jill Hasday, University of Minnesota Law School
    • Martha Jones, Johns Hopkins Department of History
    • Serena Mayeri, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Coffee Break, 3:45 – 4:15 PM

Keynote Conversation on “Women & Law, Past & Present,” 4:15 – 5:15 PM
    • Judge Michelle Friedland, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
    • Justice Tanya R. Kennedy, New York Supreme Court Civil Branch & Immediate Past President of the National Association of Women Judges
    • Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California

Closing Reception in Honor of Women Trailblazers in Law, 5:15 – 6:15 PM

The reception is generously sponsored by the Robert Crown Law Library to honor the launch of the “Women Trailblazers in Law” website, a collaboration with the American Bar Foundation and the American Bar Association.

Registration is required and is on a first come, first served basis. Seating is limited. To register, click here.

Munshi on White Slavery in an Age of Contract

Sherally Munshi, Georgetown University Law Center, has posted White Slavery and the Crisis of Will in the Age of Contract, which appeared in the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 30 (2018): 327-69:

Recognizing human freedom is never as simple as acts of legal pronouncement might suggest. Liberal abstractions like freedom and equality; legal formulations of personhood, free will, and contract; the constructed divisions between public and private, self and other, home and market on which the former are predicated — these are often inadequate to understanding, let alone realizing, the shared aspirations they supposedly define. By the same token, the dense and dynamic relations of power that characterize any liberal society overwhelm and exceed our critical vocabulary. “Racism,” “sexism,” and “capitalism” powerfully name structures of inequality, but they fail to capture the full spectrum of social relations, practices, and exchanges that reproduce inequality — deep structures of feeling, unspoken common sense, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our places in it. Focusing on an early twentieth-century case involving an immigrant convicted of “white slavery,” accused of “mesmerizing” his secretary, this Article explores the ways in which the white slave panic and spiritualist practices reflect a set of anxieties about the nature of agency and consent obscured by the universalizing and formalist abstractions of contract law and theory. Through a close reading of competing narratives surrounding the case, this Article seeks to investigate some of the ways in which the rhetorical distortions of law affect the lives of its most vulnerable subjects.

Jones-Rogers, "They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South"

New from Yale University Press: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (UC Berkeley). A description from the Press:

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

A few blurbs:

“They Were Her Property is nothing less than phenomenal. It shatters many sacred cows about women’s history and legal history and shows how slaveowning women skirted the limitations of gender norms and statutory law in ways that have been previously underestimated. The findings are buttressed by reading anew a rich and prodigious body of primary sources. This is a must read.”—Tera W. Hunter 

"They Were Her Property casts brilliant, unsparing light on the history of slaveholding women and the terrible oscillation of domination and dependence that defined identities—as wives, as mothers, as mistresses—purchased in the slave market."—Walter Johnson

More information from the Press available here.

The book is already getting some great media coverage. Here's a link to an interview with Professor Jones-Rogers about the book. Here's a recent review from Slate, by Rebecca Onion.

Weekend Roundup

• Here’s the amicus brief filed in November 2018 in Chicago v. Whitaker, a sanctuary cities case, by legal historians at the Stanford Law School and Princeton University in defense of we explain that nationwide injunctions.  "History is a notoriously difficult subject."  H/t: Andrew Zimmerman

•  “With interviews completed of more than 40 women law professors . . . , the Women in Legal Education Oral History Project is seeking additional subjects in order to capture the voices of the first true generation of women professors.”  H/t: Karen Sloan on Law.com. 

• Harvard Law Today has posted a Q&A with Christine Desan, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, on the conference, “Money as a Democratic Medium,” held at HLS on December 14 and 15, 2018.  The event challenged “a diverse group of lawyers, economists, and scholars . . . to re-examine the history of money in America, and to redefine its future.”

• Allison Brownell Tirres has published Taking Away Citizenship: Lessons from the British Advisory Committee, an appreciation of Patrick Weil and Nicholas Handler, Revocation of Citizenship and the Rule of Law: How Judicial Review Defeated Britain’s First Denaturalization Regime, 36 Law & Hist. Rev. 295 (2018), on JOTWELL. 

• The Call for Proposals for the 134th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association is here.  Deadline for submissions is February 15, 2019.

• ICYMI: The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle on the landmark commercial likeness case of Abigail Roberson (on which see also Samantha Barbas's Laws of Image).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Amann on Female Officals at the Tokyo Tribunal

Diane Marie Amann, University of Georgia School of Law, has posted Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal:

Compared to its Nuremberg counterpart, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has scarcely been visible in the seven decades since both tribunals’ inception. Recently the situation has changed, as publications of IMTFE documents have occurred alongside divers legal and historical writings, as well as two films and a miniseries. These new accounts give new visibility to the Tokyo Trial – or at least to the roles that men played at those trials. This essay identifies several of the women at Tokyo and explores roles they played there, with emphasis on lawyers and analysts for the prosecution and the defense. As was the case with my 2010 essay, “Portraits of Women at Nuremberg,” the discussion is preliminary, offering glimpses of the Tokyo women in an effort to encourage further research.

Weekend Roundup

• Last Thursday,  the Irish Women Lawyers’ Association sponsored “Lawful Attire,” a lecture on the history of lawyers’ clothing, by Hilary O’Kelly, lecturer in visual culture at the National College of Art and Design.  Irish Legal News.

• The Scotsman's obituary of Alan Watson, "Scots-born legal scholar who wrote groundbreaking texts on Roman law." 

• We were in the library with some time to kill when our eye fell on a recent acquisition, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla’s He Reo Wāhine (Auckland University Press), “a bold work that rediscovers the lost voices of Maori women in nineteenth-century New Zealand through their own words.”  Of course, legal sources are one place where the lost voices were found, especially in connection with land sales and testamentary matters.

• Jeffrey Winn reviews Jane Sherron De Hart’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), in the New York Law Journal.

• Stanford Law School’s press release on Amalia D. Kessler’s receipt of the 2018 John Phillip Reid Book Award at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History for Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877. 

• In September "the Tobin Project gathered ten scholars for the first meeting of our research inquiry on When Democracy Breaks. This project seeks to explore past cases of democratic collapse and identify the factors that led to decline, with the goal of better understanding why democracies fail and how we can sustain a robust democracy over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Francine Uenuma on The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence, in The Smithsonian.

• Medieval Digital Resources, a new site by the Medieval Academy of America, looks interesting on canon and Welsh law.

• Do you write to music or in silence? If the former: a recent Twitter thread with recommendations here. 

• This week marked the death anniversary (62nd) of B. D. Ambedkar (1891-1956), prime architect of India's Constitution and critic of the caste system. New book out on his thought and legacy here. Here is a fragment of his remarkable autobiographical piece, "Waiting for a Visa" (c.1935-6). 

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.