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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)

Amazon.com Price:  $37.98 (as of 23/04/2019 19:37 PST- Details)

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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 at the side of systematic analysis of gendered litigation patterns, Cornelia Dayton argues that women’s relation to the courtroom scene in early New England shifted from one in every of integration in the mid-seventeenth century to one in every of marginality by the eve of the Revolution.

Using the court records of New Haven, which in the beginning had the most Puritan-dominated legal regime of the entire colonies, Dayton argues that Puritanism’s insistence on godly behavior and communal modes of disputing first of all created peculiar opportunities for women’s voices to be heard within the legal system. But women’s presence in the courts declined significantly through the years as Puritan beliefs lost their status as the organizing principles of society, as legal practice started 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 used to be a an important 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.

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