Women's History and Rights

Katrina Jagodinsky is a Susan J. Rosowski Professor of History. She is a legal historian examining marginalized peoples’ engagement with nineteenth-century legal regimes and competing jurisdictions throughout the North American West. Her first book, "Legal Codes & Talking Trees: Indigenous Women's Sovereignty in Puget Sound and Sonoran Borderlands, 1854-1946" (Yale University Press, 2016), examined Native women's legal claims prior to U.S. citizenship. She has published a number of articles that examine the efforts of Indigenous and mixed-race women and children to leverage the American legal system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jagodinsky recently launched PetitioningforFreedom.org, a digital project that chronicles and indexes nearly 2,000 legal cases filed between 1812-1924. (Updated March 2025.)