Women and the Law

Abstract

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.