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Petticoats and Prejudice - Women's Press Classics: Women and Law in Nineteenth-century Canada
467 page hardcover edition published in Canada
- GenresNonfiction
494 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1991
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 25, 2023
also read for class. very interesting history of how laws were made about women. i knew women were treated like property, but truly crazy how laws evolved to get to there, or just how the women's movmeemnt in general chnaged. again, a lot of names that i forgot about while reading but even just reading a few chapters its really interesting
May 30, 2024
Read for CML4382: Feminist Legal Issues. I loved it and I feel that this was so important to read as a feminist and a law student.
August 14, 2012
From the back cover:
"Euphemia Rabbitt, who courageously resisted a vicious rape attempt, and Clara Brett Martin, the first woman admitted to the bar in the British Empire, were widely admired in their own time. But Ellen Rogers, a prostitute who believed that all women should be protected by law from sexual assault and was viciously maligned for her ideas, and Nellie Armstrong, whose attempt to wrest her young children from her estranged and violent husband went down to defeat, were independently minded women hidden, until now, from historical records.
Each of these women’s stories lends a new meaning and dimension to the word "heroism". Petticoats & Prejudice explores the legal status of women in nineteenth-century Canada by examining the cases of these and other individual women who were sept up into the legal process as litigants, accused criminals or witnesses."
From the Introduction:
"Over the past decade, Professor Constance Backhouse of the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, has been publishing pioneering articles on the place of women in nineteenth-century Canadian society as reflected in law and legal institutions. These articles, which cover a wide range of topics, deal with numerous cases, both Canadian and foreign, through both legal and historical analysis. By contrast, each chapter of Petticoats and Prejudice highlights only a few of the more significant cases in each subject area. The resulting work, the first comprehensive book in the field of Canadian women’s legal history, is marvellously readable. Covering issues such as marriage, divorce, separation, child custody, seduction, rape, infanticide, abortion, prostitution, and labour law, the book also addresses the battle for women’s admission to the practice of law. In doing so, it makes an outstanding contribution for our understanding of a range of critical issues in nineteenth-century Canadian history. Petticoats and Prejudice is a pioneering effort that will be read with pleasure and profit by all."
Reading Backhouse's book made clear to me both the groundbreaking nature of her research and how far Canadian women's history has come since its initial publication. This is a book I would describe as descriptive rather than analytic, but the sheer breadth of Backhouse's research and the important issues she highlights is impressive. As well, we needed this sort of foundation before more recent works such as Carter's The Importance of Being Monogamous could be written.
This work discusses the patriarchal and colonialist aspects of both the law and and the legal profession’s treatment of women. It primarily focuses on European women (a point that Backhouse acknowledges), although there are some key cases involving aboriginal women and as well. Backhouse demonstrates how the legal system, the parliamentary officials, and legal officers were prejudiced against women, treating them as property of either their fathers or their husbands. Backhouse uses cases of individual women in order to highlight overall legal trends. For example, by tracing the legal reactions to mixed-race marriages between white men & aboriginal women, we can see how both fur traders and the courts viewed aboriginal peoples. As aboriginal allies declined in value, so too did mixed-race marriages, making it easier to end them. (Again, a point explored in more depth by Carter.) She also discusses how marriage laws were a way of controlling & assimilating Aboriginal peoples in general, but also a means of controlling children - parental laws were upheld consistently in Quebec in cases of secret marriages between people below the age of consent.
In discussing the various types of legal remedies that were available to women in Canada, Backhouse shows how
daughters were treated as property of their fathers, particularly in seduction cases where their fathers could bring suit as to their loss of their labour: women could not bring their own suits because they didn't own their own labour. She also makes clear the issues of urbanization and rural/urban divide: practices like "bundling" (where young men and women would spend the night together doing everything but having sex... or maybe they did have sex) were acceptable in rural areas but city courts and juries were disturbed by them.
Backhouse also shows the influence of maternal feminism on the legal and political attitudes towards women (showing how maternal feminism was mostly a class-based experience) - pushing the idea of the angel in the household, women’s superior moral roles, etc. A lot of laws were specifically aimed at women under 21 in order to protect them from men. There wasn’t a push to give women equality, but to make men treat women nicer. Middle-class social reformers were less concerned with what working class women and their families wanted (see: criminalization of seduction versus allowing families to sue) and more concerned with Moral Reform.
There was a big concern about allowing women to be mothers - for example, the concerns about shopgirls and the damage they underwent in the working world that could prevent them from having children. However, this was limited by class and race: the fears were for the reproductive capacity of the white Anglo-Saxon race (and presumably Protestant and from Northern Europe). Backhouse shows how urbanization and concerns about women’s reproductive health (and their subsequent ability to properly mother their children, ensuring they would grow up to be religious and educated) rose in tandem.
Backhouse emphasizes that the laws designed to protect women and under which women were convicted and imprisoned were all designed and enforced by men. Women found every stage of their lives touched by the long arm of the law, from courtship through marriage, from consensual sexual encounters to forcible ones, throughout all aspects of fertility and reproduction, through marital breakdown, separation, divorce, and child custody, and in the field of waged and entrepreneurial work. She also traces changes in the status of motherhood and childhood seen over the course of the century, particularly in child custody cases.
This book is still an interesting and important read despite its age, and I would recommend it to both historians and interested lay-people alike. It's very readable, telling stories in order to demonstrate the legal and social principles that Backhouse is discussing/
"Euphemia Rabbitt, who courageously resisted a vicious rape attempt, and Clara Brett Martin, the first woman admitted to the bar in the British Empire, were widely admired in their own time. But Ellen Rogers, a prostitute who believed that all women should be protected by law from sexual assault and was viciously maligned for her ideas, and Nellie Armstrong, whose attempt to wrest her young children from her estranged and violent husband went down to defeat, were independently minded women hidden, until now, from historical records.
Each of these women’s stories lends a new meaning and dimension to the word "heroism". Petticoats & Prejudice explores the legal status of women in nineteenth-century Canada by examining the cases of these and other individual women who were sept up into the legal process as litigants, accused criminals or witnesses."
From the Introduction:
"Over the past decade, Professor Constance Backhouse of the Faculty of Law, University of Western Ontario, has been publishing pioneering articles on the place of women in nineteenth-century Canadian society as reflected in law and legal institutions. These articles, which cover a wide range of topics, deal with numerous cases, both Canadian and foreign, through both legal and historical analysis. By contrast, each chapter of Petticoats and Prejudice highlights only a few of the more significant cases in each subject area. The resulting work, the first comprehensive book in the field of Canadian women’s legal history, is marvellously readable. Covering issues such as marriage, divorce, separation, child custody, seduction, rape, infanticide, abortion, prostitution, and labour law, the book also addresses the battle for women’s admission to the practice of law. In doing so, it makes an outstanding contribution for our understanding of a range of critical issues in nineteenth-century Canadian history. Petticoats and Prejudice is a pioneering effort that will be read with pleasure and profit by all."
Reading Backhouse's book made clear to me both the groundbreaking nature of her research and how far Canadian women's history has come since its initial publication. This is a book I would describe as descriptive rather than analytic, but the sheer breadth of Backhouse's research and the important issues she highlights is impressive. As well, we needed this sort of foundation before more recent works such as Carter's The Importance of Being Monogamous could be written.
This work discusses the patriarchal and colonialist aspects of both the law and and the legal profession’s treatment of women. It primarily focuses on European women (a point that Backhouse acknowledges), although there are some key cases involving aboriginal women and as well. Backhouse demonstrates how the legal system, the parliamentary officials, and legal officers were prejudiced against women, treating them as property of either their fathers or their husbands. Backhouse uses cases of individual women in order to highlight overall legal trends. For example, by tracing the legal reactions to mixed-race marriages between white men & aboriginal women, we can see how both fur traders and the courts viewed aboriginal peoples. As aboriginal allies declined in value, so too did mixed-race marriages, making it easier to end them. (Again, a point explored in more depth by Carter.) She also discusses how marriage laws were a way of controlling & assimilating Aboriginal peoples in general, but also a means of controlling children - parental laws were upheld consistently in Quebec in cases of secret marriages between people below the age of consent.
In discussing the various types of legal remedies that were available to women in Canada, Backhouse shows how
daughters were treated as property of their fathers, particularly in seduction cases where their fathers could bring suit as to their loss of their labour: women could not bring their own suits because they didn't own their own labour. She also makes clear the issues of urbanization and rural/urban divide: practices like "bundling" (where young men and women would spend the night together doing everything but having sex... or maybe they did have sex) were acceptable in rural areas but city courts and juries were disturbed by them.
Backhouse also shows the influence of maternal feminism on the legal and political attitudes towards women (showing how maternal feminism was mostly a class-based experience) - pushing the idea of the angel in the household, women’s superior moral roles, etc. A lot of laws were specifically aimed at women under 21 in order to protect them from men. There wasn’t a push to give women equality, but to make men treat women nicer. Middle-class social reformers were less concerned with what working class women and their families wanted (see: criminalization of seduction versus allowing families to sue) and more concerned with Moral Reform.
There was a big concern about allowing women to be mothers - for example, the concerns about shopgirls and the damage they underwent in the working world that could prevent them from having children. However, this was limited by class and race: the fears were for the reproductive capacity of the white Anglo-Saxon race (and presumably Protestant and from Northern Europe). Backhouse shows how urbanization and concerns about women’s reproductive health (and their subsequent ability to properly mother their children, ensuring they would grow up to be religious and educated) rose in tandem.
Backhouse emphasizes that the laws designed to protect women and under which women were convicted and imprisoned were all designed and enforced by men. Women found every stage of their lives touched by the long arm of the law, from courtship through marriage, from consensual sexual encounters to forcible ones, throughout all aspects of fertility and reproduction, through marital breakdown, separation, divorce, and child custody, and in the field of waged and entrepreneurial work. She also traces changes in the status of motherhood and childhood seen over the course of the century, particularly in child custody cases.
This book is still an interesting and important read despite its age, and I would recommend it to both historians and interested lay-people alike. It's very readable, telling stories in order to demonstrate the legal and social principles that Backhouse is discussing/
July 6, 2012
Still a classic of Canadian women's and legal history -- an important look at ideology, and the treatment of women under the law in Canada. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
March 6, 2014
Amazing Book! It's interesting to read the early history of Canada and the Law that related to women. Each story is compelling but also disappointing in its treatment of women.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews