Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press) - Softcover

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807845612 ISBN 13: 9780807845615

Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 1995

Synopsis

Women before the Bar is the first study to investigate changing patterns of women's participation in early American courts across a broad range of legal actions--including proceedings related to debt, divorce, illicit sex, rape, and slander. Weaving the stories of individual women together with systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women's relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one of marginality by the eve of the Revolution. Using the court records of New Haven, which originally had the most Puritan-dominated legal regime of all the colonies, Dayton argues that Puritanism's insistence on godly behavior and communal modes of disputing initially created unusual opportunities for women's voices to be heard within the legal system. But women's presence in the courts declined significantly over time as Puritan beliefs lost their status as the organizing principles of society, as legal practice began to adhere more closely to English patriarchal models, as the economy became commercialized, and as middle-class families developed an ethic of privacy. By demonstrating that the early eighteenth century was a crucial locus of change in law, economy, and gender ideology, Dayton's findings argue for a reconceptualization of women's status in colonial New England and for a new periodization of women's history.

About this title

Book Description:

"Finely crafted. . . . Tackles questions that have long engaged feminist historians and other scholars interested in women and the law."-- Signs

About the Author:

Cornelia Hughes Dayton is associate professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.

About this edition

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0807845612
• ISBN 13: 9780807845615
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 400