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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. 

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. 

Tribal Constitutions, Citing Slavery, and Petitioning for Freedom are digital legal history projects focused on expressions of sovereignty within tribal constitutions, the remnants of slavery in modern law, and the underexamined role of habeas petitioners in challenging coercion and confinement in the long-nineteenth-century United States. Each project deploys legal databases differently, but with the shared goal of contributing key insights to legal historical scholarship and offering interfaces that appeal to a broad, public audience. 

Tribal Constitutions, Citing Slavery, andPetitioning for Freedom are digital legal history projects focused onexpressions of sovereignty within tribal constitutions, the remnants of slaveryin modern law, and the underexamined role of habeas petitioners in challengingcoercion and confinement in the long-nineteenth-century United States. Eachproject deploys legal databases differently, but with the shared goal ofcontributing key insights to legal historical scholarship and offeringinterfaces that appeal to a broad, public audience.