Women and the Law

In the early modern Atlantic world, the law conditioned gendered power relations in European and colonial contexts alike. The everyday workings of legal systems yielded a vast archive of legal sources. These include statutes, treatises, petitions, legal instruments, and court, notarial, and probate records. Since emergence of women’s and gender history as vibrant fields of inquiry during the final decades of the 20th century, scholars have mined these and other complementary sources in order to interrogate women’s relationship to the law. Casting c. 1400–1815 as a distinctive period spanning from early colonial encounters to the birth of modern nation-states, these researchers emphasize that overlapping jurisdictions and legal systems shaped early modern women’s statuses and access to recourse. They have traced the ways in which the law structured women’s lives opposing ways: as an instrument of regulation and discipline, and as a source of authority for women within their households and communities. They have additionally analyzed women as legal actors, examining their uses of law and the forms of skill and strategy they demonstrated in the course of such activities. European-descended settlers and officials transported metropolitan legal systems with them to colonial contexts, and such legal systems thus functioned as an instrument of colonialism, affording greater accessibility and protections to white women than to black and indigenous women. Yet African-descended and Native women equally possessed their own understandings of law and justice, and they maneuvered within European-derived legal systems to advance their own interests. This bibliography attends to the major areas of scholarly inquiry on women and the law c. 1400–1815, many of which necessarily overlap. In keeping with recent scholarly trends in Atlantic and early American history, it does so by grouping works thematically. This organizational structure reflects the interconnectedness of the early modern Atlantic world and underscores that the history of women and the law resists straightforward narratives of declension or improvement. By inviting comparisons across regions, a thematic approach clarifies the ways in which specific imperial and local contexts shaped women’s relationship to the law. It also reveals commonalities in the patriarchal character of European-derived legal systems, and the ways in which they functioned similarly in order to create intersecting hierarchies of race, class, and gender. For specific regions, see also the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles Gender in the Caribbean, Gender in Iberian America, and Gender in North America.

It’s Not the Lawyers We Need to Convince

Legal Negotiation may be a magnum opus, but it was only the opening salvo in career now spanning four decades. So many of the ideas and themes that came to mark Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s career are here, reflected largely in the meticulously researched literature review that plays out in the footnotes: women and the law, social science and human behavior, and the importance of ethics. And that’s just the footnotes....

Women as sponsors : gendering Canadian family class immigration policy

Canada's family class immigration policy has been studied as a gendered policy that has differential and harmful effects on women sponsored by their male spouses for immigration to Canada (Côté et al., 2001; National Association for Women and the Law, 1999; Thobani, 2000). As women are commonly seen as migrating for marriage and men for work (Sweetman, 1998), there has been little research done on the experiences of women who sponsor male spouses for immigration to Canada. This study explores the experiences of sponsoring women, mainly how their economic and family situations are affected by immigration policy and process. Using multiple forms of data, particularly judicial cases and interviews with sponsoring women, the study extracts themes related to immigration policy, immigration process, neo-liberalism, and the Sponsorship Agreement. It concludes that immigration policy and process create barriers to the family reunification of sponsoring women and their partners, increase the economic marginalization of women, and re-victimize women who have been abused by sponsored partners by holding them responsible for the Sponsorship Agreement.

Women as sponsors : gendering Canadian family class immigration policy

Canada's family class immigration policy has been studied as a gendered policy that has differential and harmful effects on women sponsored by their male spouses for immigration to Canada (Côté et al., 2001; National Association for Women and the Law, 1999; Thobani, 2000). As women are commonly seen as migrating for marriage and men for work (Sweetman, 1998), there has been little research done on the experiences of women who sponsor male spouses for immigration to Canada. This study explores the experiences of sponsoring women, mainly how their economic and family situations are affected by immigration policy and process. Using multiple forms of data, particularly judicial cases and interviews with sponsoring women, the study extracts themes related to immigration policy, immigration process, neo-liberalism, and the Sponsorship Agreement. It concludes that immigration policy and process create barriers to the family reunification of sponsoring women and their partners, increase the economic marginalization of women, and re-victimize women who have been abused by sponsored partners by holding them responsible for the Sponsorship Agreement.

Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice in Britain, 1300–1700: An Introduction

This introduction places the articles featured in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies within the context of recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern women and the law. It is designed to highlight the many boundaries that structured women's legal agency in Britain, including the procedural boundaries that filtered their voices through male advisers and officials, the jurisdictional boundaries that shaped litigation strategies, the constraints surrounding women's appearance as witnesses in court, the gendered differentiation of rights determined by primogeniture and marital property law, and the boundaries between legal and extralegal activity. Emphasizing the importance of a nuanced approach, it rejects the construction of women's litigation simply as a form of resistance to patriarchal norms and also urges caution against overestimating or oversimplifying the choices available to women in legal disputes or their latitude to operate as autonomous individuals. Gender intersected in British courts with locality, resources, jurisdiction, social status, and familial, religious, and political affiliations to inform different women's access to justice, which involved negotiations between unequal actors within various constraints and in complex alignment with multiple and often competing interests.