@article{THESIS,
      recid = {10127},
      author = {Covkin, Serena},
      title = {Fighting in Court: Women, War, and the Law in  Twentieth-Century America},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2023-12},
      number = {THESIS},
      pages = {355},
      abstract = {This dissertation is a history of women, war, and the law  in twentieth-century America. In particular, it focuses on  four landmark decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court: United  States v. Schwimmer (1929); Reid v. Covert, first  adjudicated in 1956 and then adjudicated again (and  reversed) in 1957; Griswold v. Connecticut (1965); and  Rostker v. Goldberg (1981). These cases have never before  been examined side-by-side, because they traverse multiple  domains of constitutional law and multiple, overlapping  domains of immigration law, military law, and criminal law  as well. This dissertation, however, argues that the  Court’s decisions in Schwimmer, Reid, Griswold, and  Goldberg all hinged on the same, basic question: namely, in  what ways and by what means were women obliged—and not  obliged—to serve their country in time of war? What’s more,  the dissertation argues that the four decisions answered  this question in wildly different—and sometimes  diametrically opposed—ways, necessarily complicating our  understanding of how American women (and American men, for  that matter) worked to lay claim to the rights and  obligations of twentieth-century citizenship.The  dissertation begins in the aftermath of the First World  War, when the U.S. was abruptly thrust into a new position  of international authority—and subsequently became  entangled in an almost-endless number of military conflicts  around the globe. Beginning in this same period, American  women also became increasingly, more intimately involved in  both the U.S. military and broader projects of state  violence—and a long-assumed distinction between  prototypically male citizen-soldiers, on the one hand, and  quintessentially female civilians, on the other, fell  steadily apart. This dissertation analyzes and interrogates  these large-scale (and primarily extra-legal) developments  and unearths connections—between America’s military  fortunes and the closer-to-home battles fought at the U.S.  Supreme Court—that many other legal historians have failed  to recognize and draw out. At the same time, the  dissertation makes clear that constitutional doctrine  followed no clear-cut, linear progression: across these  four cases, the Court intervened to demarcate women’s  distance from war just as often as it recognized—or  imagined—women’s proximity to the same. There was no easy  path to sex equality, charted out through armed conflict or  otherwise, and sometimes no path to equality at all.  Instead, in Schwimmer, Reid, Griswold, and Goldberg, the  Court trafficked in contradictions, indulged in legal  fictions, and gave rise to unintended consequences that  we’re still living with today. Chapter 1 focuses on several  resident alien women who were denied naturalization—all for  refusing to bear arms in defense of the United States—in  the decades between the First and Second World Wars.  Chapter 2 focuses on two service wives—both of whom, while  stationed overseas in the early postwar period, killed  their military-officer husbands—and then fought to be tried  by civilian juries (rather than by military courts-martial)  for their crimes. Chapter 3 examines the Cold War origins  of the constitutional right to privacy. Chapter 4 examines  the contested constitutionality of the all-male military  draft, from the Vietnam War era through the early 1980s.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/10127},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.10127},
}