2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

For the track Gender and the State: Majorities and Minorities

This session will discuss marriage, reproduction, and family structure in three zones of U.S. conquest in the early nineteenth century: trans-Appalachia, Florida, and the Pacific Northwest. The goal is to consider, in these specific contexts, how gender analysis can advance our understanding of what historians have come to call “settler colonialism”:  acts of conquest by which newly arriving people displace prior inhabitants, often with a combination of violence and racialized ideological justification.

The papers will consider ways in which US policymakers balanced different state objectives as they designed policies on marriage and divorce on the frontier; the structures and strategies of settler families in Florida, including white women’s roles, and the roles of Seminole women affected by their intrusion; and policies by which the the federal government sought to promote reproductive labor and population growth in Oregon, a key site for advancing claims to trans-continental territory.  Taken together, the papers reveal, from an early date, direct federal intervention in marriage and family practices, undertaken in pursuit of national expansion and territorial acquisition.  The panelists will consider the impact of these policies on ordinary people—women and men, settlers and those dispossessed—and the implications for our understanding of both settler colonialism and the gendered exercise of state power.