Gender Remade

Gender Remade examines the role that constitutional culture played in the transition from territory to statehood in the American West.

Gender Remade explores the passage from territory to state in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Washington, showing that jury duty was as important as the right to vote in late nineteenth-century campaigns for constitutional equality and offers ways to remedy the neglect of state and territorial studies among constitutional historians.Gender Remade explores a little-known experiment in gender equality in Washington Territory in the 1870s and 1880s. Building on path-breaking innovations in marital and civil equality, lawmakers extended a long list of political rights and obligations to both men and women, including the right to serve on juries and hold public office. As the territory moved toward statehood, however, jury duty and constitutional co-sovereignty proved to be particularly controversial; in the end, 'modernization' and national integration brought disastrous losses for women until 1910, when political rights were partially restored. Losses to women's sovereignty were profound and enduring - a finding that points, not to rights and powers, but to constitutionalism and the power of social practice as Americans struggled to establish gender equality. Gender Remade is a significant contribution to the understudied legal history of the American West, especially the role that legal culture played in transitioning from territory to statehood.