By Angela Boswell:
http://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/19236/9827369.PDF?sequence=1
Nineteenth-century American ideologies and cultural prescriptions dictated that women leave the public sphere responsibilities of business, law, and politics to men. However, statutes throughout the United States allowed and even required women at times to enter the public sphere. This dissertation examines women’s actions in the public sphere in one rural southern county in Texas from its frontier era through Reconstruction. A thorough examination of District and County Court, marriage, probate, bond, deed, brand, and Confederate Widows’ Pension records, as well as a few extant Justice of the Peace record books, scattered issues of local newspapers, and letters and diaries, sheds light on the breadth of women’s activity in public and private life. Cotton-producing Colorado County, Texas, on the frontier of southern society offers a portrait of the effect that cultural prescriptions, laws, and circumstances had on southern women’s decisions to enter and their activities within the public sphere.
http://scholarship.rice.edu/bitstream/handle/1911/19236/9827369.PDF?sequence=1
Nineteenth-century American ideologies and cultural prescriptions dictated that women leave the public sphere responsibilities of business, law, and politics to men. However, statutes throughout the United States allowed and even required women at times to enter the public sphere. This dissertation examines women’s actions in the public sphere in one rural southern county in Texas from its frontier era through Reconstruction. A thorough examination of District and County Court, marriage, probate, bond, deed, brand, and Confederate Widows’ Pension records, as well as a few extant Justice of the Peace record books, scattered issues of local newspapers, and letters and diaries, sheds light on the breadth of women’s activity in public and private life. Cotton-producing Colorado County, Texas, on the frontier of southern society offers a portrait of the effect that cultural prescriptions, laws, and circumstances had on southern women’s decisions to enter and their activities within the public sphere.
