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ABSTRACTS
| Eliza Earle Ferguson, "Judicial Authority and Popular Justice: Crimes of Passion in Fin-de-Siècle Paris"
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In fin-de-siècle France, jurists became alarmed by the high rate of acquittals in cases of "crimes of passion" tried by jury in the assize courts. The acquittal of so many defendants who readily admitted their crimes seemed to prove that the citizen jurors of the Third Republic were not competent to render justice. Through an investigation of French judicial procedures, together with evidence from 251 cases of intimate violence tried in the assize court of the Seine, this article contends that the high rate of acquittal was due to the transfer of a popular system of retributive justice into the verdict of the court. Surprisingly, judicial procedures worked to privilege the stories, knowledge, and standards of witnesses and defendants—not a strict application of the law. This analysis sheds light on popular attitudes about the use of violence in domestic disputes, as well as the complex interactions among multiple systems of judgment at stake in jury trials.
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| Mary Blewett, "Yorkshire Lasses and Their Lads: Sexuality, Sexual Customs, and Gender Antagonisms in Anglo-American Working-Class Culture"
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Fiction and historical tests carefully positioned in Anglo- American historiography provide new perspectives on the elusive world of female working-class sexuality. Working women are portrayed, not as victims or objects, but as active players in gender and class conflicts. Yorkshire lasses and older women used their sexuality to define their female adulthood through sexual experimentation during courtship, to discipline male aggressiveness and patriarchy, and to advance their status as working women. These antagonisms included sexually charged customs and behaviors, such as the ritual of "sunning": the sexual humiliation of young men by working women, and new meanings for female agency in premarital sexual activities. The behaviors and customs of Yorkshire working-class women reveal their uses of individual and collective activities to confront on their own terms both gender and class conflicts in the family, the workplace, and the trade union. The threatening power of female sexuality exercised collectively, openly, and dramatically was a reminder to all that the private world of sexuality and the workplace were deeply intertwined but not always at the expense of women.
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| Sara Butler, "Runaway Wives: Husband Desertion in Medieval England"
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With an acutely imbalanced power relationship, no financial control, and a Marian ideal of total passivity flaunted before them, wives are usually thought to have borne the brunt of medieval marriages. In particular, in a Catholic world where marriage was held up as a sacrament, and thus a permanent, monogamous union, it has often been assumed that medieval wives were caught in an earthly purgatory, suffering a life-time of marital misery. Over the past two decades, historians like R.H. Helmholz, Sue Sheridan Walker and Henry Ansgar Kelly have challenged previous ideals about the permanence of marriage. Helmholz has suggested that "self-divorce" among the medieval English may have been more common than we think. Walker and Kelly have made similar suggestions. The goal of this paper is to use their work as a foundation, to explore the various licit and illicit means of separation in late medieval England. Using marriage litigation, bishops' registers, ecclesiastical actbooks, manorial courts, chancery records, and assize rolls, this paper will attempt to discern the risks involved in husband desertion to both the wife and her "rescuers," common features of wife desertion, as well as contemporary attitudes held by both wives and society in general.
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| Timothy Parsons, "The Consequences of Uniformity: The Struggle for the Boy Scout Uniform in Colonial Kenya". . . |
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