| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

George Robb and Nancy Erber, editors. Disorder in the Courts: Trials and Sexual Conflict at the Turn of the Century. New York: New York University Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 253. $45.00.

George Robb and Nancy Erber's useful collection of essays focuses on the regulation of morality at the turn of the century, when new categories of the sexual "normal" and "abnormal" and beings such as the "New Woman" and the homosexual emerged. Following the pioneering work of Ruth Harris and Robert Nye, each author sets out to demonstrate how court cases and the press' responses to them reveled important shifts in attitudes towards gender, propriety and deviancy. Antoinette Burton skillfully uses the mid-1880s trials of Rukhmabai, an Indian child bride who refused her husband's demands for conjugal rights, to argue that the debate over age of consent—as over sati and purdah—allowed the British to use the bodies of Indian women to assert that Indian men were not fit for self-government. Hindu militants responded by presenting the case as an example of British interference. Western women necessarily took up Rukhmabai's cause, but, as Burton points out, the British were so intent on condemning the Indian husband as crude, lower-class, and violent that they ignored Rukhmabai's opposition to colonial rule and calls for government reform. One trial, Burton demonstrates, could produce multiple, competing narratives. . . .

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