LGST 3430 - History of Women’s Action for Legal and Social Change

Goals: Explore the history of American women’s organized activity as a means for legal, policy, and social change leading to citizenship, greater civil rights, and legal equity; survey histories of diverse systems change advocacy communities; investigate how the intersection of law and culture informs expectations, policies, and social practices in intended and unintended ways. Apply legal perspectives to problems in social movements.

Content: History of American women’s organized activity and its impact on state and federal law and policy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; why, and in what ways, women become involved in legal and political activism under changing notions of citizenship; understand efforts to transfer social control activities to state and federal legal systems; maternalist and feminist initiatives resulting in the development of law and policy such as Federal Mothers’ Pensions, the US Children’s Bureau, and the enactment of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act; legal social control efforts designed to reform and/or regulate social problems relating to female sexuality and establish concepts of delinquency, including moral reform and social purity movements; development of a “maternal state” through the creation of age of consent laws, criminalization of statutory rape, and regulation of abortion and sex work; state-sponsored institutions governed by law and legislation and how they impacted vulnerable citizens and expanded the carceral state; development and impact of Federal legislation and Constitutional Amendments such as the Nineteenth Amendment, the Comstock Act, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

Prerequisite: LGST 1110 or LGST 1300 with a grade of C- or better, or instructor permission

Credits: 4