This is a social and legal history of the role played by Vermont's courts in regulating sexual activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It relies on a quantitative and qualitative review of civil and criminal cases brought and disposed of in four of Vermont's county courts, as well as the decisions of Vermont's Supreme Court. Unlike urban areas that developed alternative administrative centers of regulatory power, Vermont's rural county courts were its most important site of sexual discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Civil suits were brought by and on behalf of women and girls for sexual defamation, sexual assault, breach of promise to marry, and bastardy, along with suits brought by fathers resulting from their daughters' seduction. Such suits had high success rates and awarded large monetary damages. Judges and juries focused more on the harm caused by uncontrolled male sexuality than on female moral transgressions. Men were on notice that they would be punished for violating sexual norms, including unwanted sexual advances. This study also examines how prosecutors, judges, and juries dealt with criminal sexual offenses such as adultery and forcible and statutory rape. Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the evidentiary requirements for a conviction coupled with concerns about a surging divorce rate and flagging morality led to a dramatic increase in adultery prosecutions after the Civil War. The state imprisoned hundreds of men and women for this offense. In forcible rape cases, courts allowed evidence of prior sexual acts on the part of the alleged victim to be used to impeach her credibility on the question of consent, but they also made clear that the question of consent depended on the woman's perspective. A man's perception that the sexual advance was welcome carried little weight. The state also raised the age of consent from eleven to fourteen (1886) and then sixteen (1898), leading to a surge in statutory rape prosecutions. As with forcible rape cases, guilty verdicts were obtained in a large majority of cases. And as with civil cases, judges and juries punished men for failing to control their sexual impulses.

This dissertation studies the discourse of legal scholars and reformers, exploring the ways in which their assumptions about gender shaped their arguments in relation to shorter hours and minimum wage laws. Examining seemingly abstract terms such as "freedom contract" and "citizenship," this work shows how laissez-faire legal scholars employed a discourse embedded with gender assumptions, linking manhood, work, and citizenship to ideals of individualism and competition, to argue against legislation for men. Yet logical inconsistencies arose when they tried to use these concepts, especially citizenship, to deny women protective legislation. In contrast, paternalist legal scholars concentrated on the needs of the public welfare, asserting that legislation would enable men to become better fathers, husbands, and citizens. Reformers and progressive legal scholars united to gain labor legislation for women in particular. Employing a discourse of maternalism, they argued that shorter hours and good wages preserved women for motherhood and protected their morality, thus benefiting the nation. Although this strategy worked well for hours laws, it foundered in arguments for wage legislation, especially as labor studies reported that some women supported entire families on their meager wages. The idea of the female breadwinner did not fit well with the primary identification of wage earning women as daughters and mothers. Reformers' language of motherhood also fell apart as a rationale for securing legislation when women gained the vote. Some feminists began to challenge sex-specific legislation on the grounds that it kept women from attaining full equality with men, fomenting a division among feminists and reformers that remains with us today: the "equality-versus-difference-debate." Although most activists could not reconcile this debate and ended up either supporting equality or difference, social researcher and reformer Mary Van Kleeck, an avid supporter of labor legislation, moved beyond the biologism of difference and instead focused on the commonalities that workers shared, especially in their opposition to employers. Rather than divide male and female workers, and design special legislation for each, Van Kleeck moved toward a non-gendered view of women in the workforce and focused on the idea that all workers had a right to labor legislation in exchange for their productive relation to the state.