Belonging to the World surveys the treatment of women in American law from the nation's earliest beginnings
in British North America to the present. An original work of historical synthesis, the book aims to build bridges
between fields long thought to be unbridgeable -- among them, the history of women, American constitutional and
legal history, political theory, and law. It delinates the shifting relationships between American law practice
and women, both within the family and elsewhere, as it looks beyond the campagin for women's suffrage to broader
zones of contest and controversy. Women's stories and voices are used throughout to drive home the extraordinary
range and persistence of female rebellion since the 1630s -- when Anne Hutchinson and Ann Hibbens decided to oppose
forces of constraint in colonial New England -- to the present era of "post-feminist" retrenchment and
backlash. As the narrative documents women's ongoing battles for such rights have been governed differently from
men, often out of the state's line of vision, and that much of this difference reflected the survival of a unitary
monarchical "head" in the constitutional and moral economy of households. Excellent for use in constitutional
law and women's studies classes.
The only narrative treatment of women and American law which gives full coverage to the pre-Civil War period
Provides a corrective to the still widely-held notion that the story of women and the law is synonmous with
suffrage or married women's property acts; shows instead that American women have been active in an extraordinary
range of struggles to gain their legal rights and freedoms, such as freedom of speech and access to the marketplace
Table of Contents
Editor's Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. "The Way of Obedience": Foundations
1. Governing Women in British North America
2. Toward the Revolutionary Settlement
Part II. "Talk is the Fountain-Head of All Things": Republican Speech Communities and Coequality
3. Law, Gender, and Domestic Culture
4. Republican Speech Communities
5. Toward Coequality and Self-Possession
6. Capitalism and the New American Empire
7. The Civil War Settlement
Part III. "Governments Try Themselves": Democratic Suffrage Communities and Equality
8. Democratic Suffrage Communities
9. Economic Protection versus Equal Rights
10. Physical Protection versus Self-Sovereignty
11. The Civil Rights Settlement
