Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

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.Cornelia Hughes Dayton is the author of 'Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)', published 1995 under ISBN 9780807822449 and ISBN 0807822442.