The Rosine Association Casebooks give biographies of women assisted by the Rosine Association, "a house for the reformation, employment and instruction of women, who had led immoral lives," between 1848 and 1858. A typical entry discusses the woman's place of birth, her family situation, her life in brief, and her contact with the Association. Dataset and transcripts prepared by the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.
The Rosine Association, based in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s, was "a house for the reformation, employment and instruction of women, who had led immoral lives." The Rosine Association served women who struggled with addiction, domestic violence, and/or sexual assault; women who may have engaged in sex work and other criminalized economies; women who challenged the gender and racial binaries of their times; in short, women who lived at the margins of society.
There are two extant casebooks for the Rosine Association, dating from 1848 to 1858, and possibly spanning the entire life of the organization. Typical entries provide basic biographical information about each woman, her family situation, challenges that led her to seek out or be referred to the Association, and the circumstances surrounding her departure. The casebooks are extraordinary, unique sources for understanding the lives of women who are usually excluded from documentary records.
The casebooks are stored at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College as part of the Mira Sharpless Townsend Papers (RG5/320) and scans of the casebooks are available online. This dataset was compiled in 2020-2021 to facilitate understanding and use of their important historical contents.
General Content warning: This dataset may include references to topics such as sexual assault, domestic violence, physical violence, self-harm, addiction, and identity-based discrimination and harassment. The editorial team acknowledges that it can be difficult to engage with this content.
Specific trigger warnings:
- Addiction (alcohol, especially)
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexual abuse of minors
- Incest
- Health and illnesses
- Suicide
- Labor trafficking
This repository includes three types of resources:
- Notes / Editorial notes about the process of creating this dataset
- Dataset / Most recent edit of Rosine casebook data
- Transcripts / File folder containing plain-text transcripts of each entry in the Rosine casebooks
This dataset is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)
Please cite this dataset:
Rosine Association (Philadelphia, Pa.), Rosine Association casebooks, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, [version or date of last update], [url].
The editorial team welcomes suggestions about our approach as well as corrections to any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations. While we cannot change quotations and words used in the original text, if you recommend a change to words that appear in our category headings or other descriptions written by the editorial team, or if you feel we may have miscategorized a person based on the evidence in the Rosine Casebooks, please let us know. Feedback can be emailed to [email protected]
This dataset was placed on GitHub in the hopes that others will revise, refine, adapt, and use it. Users are encouraged to fork this repository and submit pull requests on GitHub, or contact the editorial team at [email protected] to let us know how you are using the dataset.