Women before the bar : gender, law, and society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 Cornelia Hughes Dayton

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--Legal status, laws, etc--Connecticut--History.

Women.

Courts--Connecticut--History.

Courts.

Connecticut--History--Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775.

Connecticut.

Physical Description:

xiv, 382 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c1995.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

From godly rules to lawyerly habits: scenes from the New Haven courtroom

Toward marginality: women and the litigated economy

Divorce: the limits of a puritan remedy

Consensual sex: the Eighteenth-Century double standard

Rape: the problematics of woman's word

Slanderous speech: gender and the fall from social grace

Divorce petitions, Connecticut and New Haven colonies, 1639-1710

Divorce petitions, Connecticut General Assembly, 1711-1789.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [337]-362) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women before the bar.

ISBN:

0807822442 (cloth : alk. paper)

9780807822449 (cloth : alk. paper)

0807845612 (pbk. : alk. paper)

9780807845615 (pbk. : alk. paper)

OCLC:

32589354