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

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel investigates the complexity of gendered power and coercion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America, West Africa, and Western Europe. The four papers center gendered power, hierarchies, and coercion in an effort to complicate prevailing historiographical and popular narratives. How were coercion and consent constructed and perceived? Who was deemed capable of giving and withdrawing consent in fraught colonial contexts such as that of eighteenth-century Senegal, colonial Mexico, Alaskan native women being forcibly removed by the Russian empire, and religio-patriarchal Massachusetts? These papers seek to complicate the consent/rape archival dichotomy, female agency under colonialism, and the pivotal role of religion in gendered colonial spaces.

Jean Pfaelzer sets aside the traditional narrative of genocide and assimilation in Native encounters to reveal the coercive history the Russian colonial trade system that resettled Native Alaskan women down the Pacific Coast to perform forced labor. Pfaelzer revises “settler colonialism” to consider women, as well as land, as property. Hannah Bailey explores the colonial French male perceptions of Muslim Senegalese circumcision to understand the ways in which West African women were classified, enslaved, and compared to the French female body ideal. Liz Elizondo extends the field of colonial Mexico north toward Coahuila and Texas and unpacks women's actions in records of rape and assault, investigating the ways in which women publicly claimed rape. Finally, Sarah Moazeni confronts the long historiography of Puritan rhetoric and argues for religion's deep impact on early New England women's ability to give and withdraw sexual consent.