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Abstract This introduction to a special issue offers a broad outline of habeas corpus historiography and explains the historical significance of that legal mechanism for people throughout the American West. It also explains the links between the special issue’s three articles—by Katrina Jagodinsky, Matthew Villeneuve, and Cory James Young—about women’s resistance to gendered violence, Indigenous families challenging federal Indian boarding school confinement, and Black minors’ ongoing vulnerability to coercive labor in the late nineteenth century.
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This content will become publicly available on May 21, 2026
“The Last Rose of Summer:” A Century of Women’s Habeas Petitions & Gendered Violence
Abstract Women’s legal mobilization in the American West between 1819 and 1924 is far more robust than scholars have previously understood. This article examines more than twenty women’s habeas corpus petitions to demonstrate the diversity of arguments that hundreds of women presented against gendered violence in courts throughout the American West. When analyzed collectively, women’s petitions highlight the importance of habeas as a tool against coverture, a legal convention that fostered gendered violence under slavery, colonization, exclusion, and detention. Women’s habeas petitions also reveal continuities in Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and incarcerated women’s legal strategies even as they faced varied forms of confinement and coercion according to their race, region, and era. Through an intersectional lens, this study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to argue that women’s habeas histories house acts of resistance and are a central chapter in American legal tradition.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1946684
- PAR ID:
- 10592125
- Publisher / Repository:
- Western Historical Quarterly
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Western Historical Quarterly
- Volume:
- 56
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0043-3810
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 133 to 151
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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