Dismantling the Patriarchal State: Women's Rights Activism, Nineteenth-Century Married Women's Property Acts, and Twentieth-Century Jury Rights Laws

在美国，妇女的激进主义在两种主要形式的妇女法律权利的扩张中发挥了作用：19世纪的已婚妇女财产法案和大约20世纪上半叶赋予妇女担任陪审团成员权利的法律。许多现有的研究认为，在更大的环境中的运动特征或机会导致有利于运动参与者的政治和法律结果。然而，当前的项目假设运动和环境因素的结合导致了运动活动家的成功结果。具体而言，我研究了政治和性别机会如何调解妇女维权活动对妇女法律权利扩张的影响。我认为，性别政治背景影响了哪些运动策略有可能成功地为妇女赢得法律改革。我通过比较两种截然不同的性别政治背景来探讨这一论点：在19世纪，女性几乎没有正式的政治权力，而在20世纪，女性获得了实质性的政治发言权。本研究中检验的假设假设，这两种不同的性别政治背景为行动主义提供了不同的机会，这些不同的机会显著影响了运动策略导致扩大的法律权利。这项研究将基于美国9个州妇女财产和陪审团权利运动及其背景的档案证据。定性历史调查结合定性比较分析（QCA）将被用来辨别导致这些法律权利改革的因素。这项研究将产生几个更广泛的影响：它将扩大我们对妇女公共角色的认识，它将为研究生提供一些学术培训机会，它将提供一套独特的数据，说明导致妇女财产权和陪审权扩大的情况。

Women's activism played a role in bringing about expansions in two key forms of women's legal rights in the United States: the married women's property acts of the 19th century and laws granting women the right to sit on juries in roughly the first half of the 20th century. Much existing research argues that movement characteristics or opportunities in the larger environment lead to favorable political and legal outcomes for movement actors. The current project, however, posits that a combination of movement and contextual factors resulted in a successful outcome for movement activists. Specifically, I investigate how political and gendered opportunities mediated the impact of women's activism on expansions in women's legal rights. I argue that the gendered political context influenced which movement strategies were likely to succeed in winning legal reforms for women. I explore this argument by comparing two very different gendered political contexts: in the 19th century when women possessed little formal political power and in the 20th century when they had gained a substantial political voice. The hypotheses examined in this research posit that these two different gendered political contexts offered different opportunities for activism and these different opportunities markedly influenced which movement strategies resulted in expanded legal rights. The research will be based on archival evidence from women's property and jury rights campaigns and their contexts in 9 U.S. states. Qualitative historical investigation combined with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) will be utilized to discern the factors that resulted in these legal rights reforms. The research will have several broader impacts: it will expand our knowledge of women's public roles, it will offer a number of scholarly training opportunities for graduate students, and it will provide a unique data set concerning the circumstances leading to expansions in women's property rights and jury rights.