Amid the decline of U.S. military campaigns against Native Americans in the late nineteenth century, assimilation policy arose as the new front in the Indian Wars, with its weapons the deployment of culture and law, and its locus the American Indian home and family. In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Piatote tracks the double movement of literature and law in the contest over the aims of settler-national domestication and the defense of tribal-national culture, political rights, and territory.
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England’s systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period. This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.
During the early twentieth century maternal and child welfare became a national issue for the first time. The child and maternal welfare movement had a significant material and ideological effect on women and it is therefore important to understand the mechanisms which structured and controlled it. Originally published in 1980, The Politics of Motherhood asks why child and maternal welfare policy took the particular form that it did during the Edwardian and inter-war years and in doing so brings together a number of important themes relating to women and social policy. By taking into account not only the professionals involved, but also the mothers themselves – their reactions to the policies implemented and their own demands for change, the study brings to the forefront such themes as the relation between health and the family economy, the control of health care and the control of reproduction. Many issues arising from these themes were of present-day interest at the time, and still are today, such as the medicalisation of childbirth which has involved a loss of control by women over its management. This study illustrates the importance of stopping to examine the pedigree of our social policies and the need to ask whether a policy developed under one specific set of social, economic and political conditions can continue to be relevant in a markedly different situation.
