Celebrating Women in Legal History: Making and Shaping a Discipline

This book champions the work of women in legal history, and their contributions to both the discipline and feminist activism over nearly two centuries.

It considers women in academia, which was, in theory, open to women before they could become lawyers in most European countries. And it considers women working beyond the academy: many studied legal history in other ways; in local history societies, through archival work, and via activism.

Women legal historians have been under-recognised or forgotten altogether, even where they made substantial scholarly contributions. In focusing on the work of women in legal history, this book lays the foundations for a transformational reassessment of the discipline. It asks searching questions about what counts as legal history. It demonstrates that work by and about women should appear in our legal history courses, be discussed in our seminars, and be cited in our academic work. If the field of legal history is lively, innovative, and wide-ranging, everyone working in it benefits. By shining a light on undervalued scholarship, and areas which have received insufficient attention, we challenge assumptions in our discipline and advance its methods.

Whilst some women were pioneers and worked to change gendered aspects of the law, others led more ordinary lives, disappearing from the gaze of legal history even as they contributed to it. This book tells some of their stories.