About

Ruth Bloch is a Professor Emeritus in the UCLA Department of History. Her research focuses on the history of women and gender from 1600 to 1860, as well as the history of religion during the same period. She has authored significant works including 'Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756-1800' and 'Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800.' Her scholarly contributions extend to articles co-authored with Naomi R. Lamoreaux, exploring topics such as corporations, civil society, and legal constraints in American history. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, with advisors including Robert Middlekauff, Henry F. May, and Robert Bellah. Her academic background also includes a B.A. in American History and Literature from Radcliffe College and a B.A. in History from UC Berkeley. Ruth Bloch's work has significantly contributed to the understanding of American thought, morality, and civil society in historical contexts.

Research topics

• History
• Political science
• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Law

Selected publications

• 8 Corporations and the Fourteenth Amendment

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2017-09-06 · 7 citations

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• Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750-1900

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2015-05-01

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  The freedom of citizens to form voluntary associations has long been viewed as an essential ingredient of modern civil society. Our chapter revises the standard Tocquevillian account of associational freedom in the early United States by accentuating the role of state courts and legislatures in the creation and regulation of nineteenth-century American nonprofit corporations. Corporate status gave associations valuable rights that went beyond the basic right of individuals to associate. Government officials selectively used their power to grant and enforce corporate charters to reward politically favored groups while denying equivalent rights to groups they viewed as politically or socially disruptive.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

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• Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750-1900

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2015-05-01 · 6 citations

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  as an essential ingredient of modern civil society. Our chapter revises the standard Tocquevillian account of associational freedom in the early United States by accentuating the role of state courts and legislatures in the creation and regulation of nineteenth-century American nonprofit corporations. Corporate status gave associations valuable rights that went beyond the basic right of individuals to associate. Government officials selectively used their power to grant and enforce corporate charters to reward politically favored groups while denying equivalent rights to groups they viewed as politically or socially disruptive.

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• Voluntary Associations, Corporate Rights, and the State: Legal Constraints on the Development of American Civil Society, 1750–1900

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2015-05-07 · 6 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding

  The freedom of citizens to form voluntary associations has long been viewed as an essential ingredient of modern civil society. Our chapter revises the standard Tocquevillian account of associational freedom in the early United States by accentuating the role of state courts and legislatures in the creation and regulation of nineteenth-century American nonprofit corporations. Corporate status gave associations valuable rights that went beyond the basic right of individuals to associate. Government officials selectively used their power to grant and enforce corporate charters to reward politically favored groups while denying equivalent rights to groups they viewed as politically or socially disruptive.

  PublisherDOI

• The American Revolution, Wife Beating, and the Emergent Value of Privacy

  Early American studies · 2007-09-01 · 34 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Using Abigail Adams's famous plea "to remember the Ladies" as its starting point, this paper examines the legal treatment of wife beating between the colonial period and the mid-nineteenth century. Trends within judicial decisions, legal treatises, and justice of the peace manuals suggest that the American Revolution contributed to a decline in the state's willingness to intervene on behalf of victims of domestic violence. Pointing to the American Revolution's dual commitment to private rights and to private life, the paper situates these trends within the longer evolution of American understandings of privacy rights. A central piece of the argument is that postrevolutionary understandings of "a right to privacy" (though that term itself was never used) were applied not to individuals but to social institutions such as the family, and that abused wives, as subordinate individuals within the family, lost opportunities to seek legal redress that had existed previously. The paper challenges common assumptions that wife beating had long been condoned by the English common law. It traces this assumption back to judicial decisions in the early United States, most notably the 1824 case of Bradley v. State, in which the value of familial privacy was joined to the unfounded premise that husbands possessed an age-old right to physically chastise their disobedient wives.

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• Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2007-09-13 · 6 citations

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  Abstract This chapter looks at important developments in the founding period, focusing on the American Revolution and immediately thereafter. It shows how important religious conceptions were, especially in New England, to the inspiration of the American Revolution and also how religious sensibilities evolved as the ideological excitement of the war gave way to the urgent necessities of nation building. The discussion addresses a basic historical question about religion and American politics: How did religious ideas contribute to the development of political ideology? Defining the topic this way necessarily brackets many other interesting questions about the role of religion in the American Revolution that fall more directly into the realms of social and political history—questions involving institutional structures and laws, the extent of clerical and lay activism, regional and denominational comparisons, and so on.

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• THE ORIGINS OF FEMINISM AND THE LIMITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

  Modern Intellectual History · 2006-09-22 · 1 citations

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  The publication of the collection of essays Women, Gender and Enlightenment (ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) affords an unusual opportunity to confront a myriad of interrelated issues, at once definitional and ideological, that face intellectual historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. The 768-page work came out of a highly unusual collaborative research project conducted from 1998 to 2001, “Feminism and Enlightenment, 1650–1850: A Comparative History,” a series of colloquia, conferences, and Internet exchanges enlisting the participation of over a hundred historians in Europe, North America, and Australia. The product of this extensive interaction showcases the contributions of thirty-eight authors, not only covering a broad array of topics but, still more remarkable, displaying a large degree of consensus about issues of interpretative concern. While dozens of books and articles have anticipated pieces of the arguments made in this volume, never has so extensive an attempt been made to pull them together into a cohesive whole.

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• Inside and outside the Public Sphere

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2005-01-01 · 14 citations

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• Doomsayers: Anglo American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution

  Journal of the Early Republic · 2004-04-01

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  Doomsayers: Anglo American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution. By Susan Juster. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 276. Illustrations. Cloth. $39.95)This delightful and provocative book describes a dimension of Anglo-American culture typically lost from view. Susan Juster delves into examples of over 300 so-called she has identified who were active in England and America between 1765 and 1815. Juster has scoured through the publications of the period looking for these often obscure figures-a prodigious act of research that graphically reaffirms the vitality of popular religion in the Age of Enlightenment. While retaining the bizarre and humorous elements of their stories, she also admirably brings the underlying desperation and devotion of her subjects to light. The concluding chapter offers an especially poignant rendering of the false pregnancy of Joanna Southcott, one of many examples of Juster's sympathetic understanding and narrative skill.Juster's analysis underscores the way her prophets exploited new opportunities for publicity afforded by the burgeoning media of the day. They frequently wrote tracts pitched to a popular audience arid conducted urban street performances that drew crowds-tactics that frequently gained the attention of newspapers arid magazines. Juster insightfully situates such methods in the context of two already familiar interpretive frameworks: market capitalism and the public sphere. The literature on the culture of capitalism has been particularly fruitful in defining themes of commodincation and salesmanship, themes that have been previously stressed by historians of the First and second Great Awakenings and which juster also uses to great effect when portraying the most persuasive peddlers of revolutionary-era prophecy. To her credit, she identifies outright swindlers without getting bogged down in the quagmire of determining who was sincere and who was merely self-serving.Paired with this emphasis on enterprise and advertising is Juster's invocation of the concept of the public sphere. Her emphasis upon the print media of broadsides, pamphlets, and books that enabled the widespread dissemination of popular prophecy places her study alongside the abundant scholarship of the past decade utilizing Jurgen Habermas's theories about eighteenth-century civic discourse. For Habermas, however, the public sphere was at once progressively proto-democratic and rationalist. Juster's prophets at times expressed radical political views, and some of them, such as James Bicheno, used the vocabulary of the Enlightenment. One chapter of the book is devoted to political aspirations, and Juster distinguishes those who espoused republican ideological commitments from those (like most of the women) who did not. Most ofjuster's figures could scarcely have departed more from a liberal model of discursive rationality, however, as they employed the communicative resources of the public sphere to claim mysterious sources of knowledge and to herald the coming of supernatural events. Typically they were far too infatuated with their own superior powers of prediction to entertain the opinions of others. Their relationship to the future of democracy lay neither in egalitariamsm nor in rationality but in their often shrewd and sensationalist mass marketing. Juster's borrowing of the term public sphere does not systematically engage theoretical issues, but her playful depiction of the flamboyant, sometimes feminized, underside of the Enlightenment is ridden with such delicious ironies.Another great strength of the book is its trans-Atlantic sweep. The English prophet Ann Lee herself crossed the sea, and many writings by others swiftly made the voyage to America in printed form. As Juster makes clear, rampant prophetic speculation infused the culture of the Atlantic world-at least the northern half of it. Yet this geographical spread also at times leaves the impression of an Anglo-American sameness that obfuscates national differences. …

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• The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion (Book)

  The William and Mary Quarterly · 2003-01-01

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Frequent coauthors

• Naomi R. Lamoreaux

  4 shared

• Jon T. Butler

  Naval Postgraduate School

  2 shared

• Barry Alan Shain

  Colgate University

  1 shared

• Darren Staloff

  1 shared

• Melvin Yazawa

  1 shared

• John F. Berens

  1 shared

• Jean E. Friedman

  1 shared

• Dickson W. Adams

  1 shared