Description: Women before the court offers an innovative, comparative approach to the study of women's legal rights during a formative period of Anglo-American history. It traces how colonists transplanted English legal institutions to America, examines the remarkable depth of women's legal knowledge and shows how the law increasingly undermined patriarchal relationships between parents and children, masters and servants, husbands and wives. The book will be of interest to scholars of Britain and colonial America, and to laypeople interested in how women in the past navigated and negotiated the structures of authority that governed them. It is packed with fascinating stories that women related to the courts in cases ranging from murder and abuse to debt and estate litigation. Ultimately, it makes a remarkable contribution to our understandings of law, power and gender in the early modern world.
Review Quotes:
'this book skilfully ties together the varied experiences of women living and litigating in England and North America across the early modern period. The book will be of interest to historians of women and legal history in Britain and the Atlantic, and should be commended for bringing together scholars who are prone to focus on particular countries or jurisdictions as case studies.'
Rebecca Mason, Reviews in History
considered required reading for scholars of women, family, property, commerce, and law in seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Anglo-America. It also provides a valuable comparative overview for scholars working on the same topics in other countries and regions. For its brevity, helpful exposition of many legal complexities, long time frame, and comparative structure, Women before the Court could also make an excellent choice as a classroom text.'
Journal of British Studies