Law, Women, and “Woman”: Women’s History and Legal History

Abstract: Law has played a central role in the framing of women’s history. Whether the emphasis is on progress or decline, the field’s meta-narratives generally assess change through a distinctly ahistorical measure: the legal category, “woman,” which lumps all women together as if it were possible to treat them as a homogenous group. While that category did not yet exist in the early republic, it emerged as a concept in that period and acquired power in law over the nineteenth century. This essay considers the category “woman” and its relationship to actual women by thinking about the law. As it argues, we need to release women from that confining legal container in order to create new synthetic narratives that reflect the full range of scholarship on real-life women in the new republic.