"The Last Rose of Summer:" A Century of Women's Habeas Petitions & Gendered Violence

Women's legal mobilization in the American West between 1819 and 1924 is far more robust than scholars have previously understood. This article examines more than twenty women's habeas corpus petitions to demonstrate the diversity of arguments that hundreds of women presented against gendered violence in courts throughout the American West. When analyzed collectively, women's petitions highlight the importance of habeas as a tool against coverture, a legal convention that fostered gendered violence under slavery, colonization, exclusion, and detention. Women's habeas petitions also reveal continuities in Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and incarcerated women's legal strategies even as they faced varied forms of confinement and coercion according to their race, region, and era. Through an intersectional lens, this study combines quantitative and qualitative analysis to argue that women's habeas histories house acts of resistance and are a central chapter in American legal tradition.