| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joyce W. Warren. Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 373. $44.95.
Joyce W. Warren's goal in this ambitious book is to complicate our understanding of the notorious dependence of nineteenth-century American women by demonstrating a very different reality. Although Warren concedes that scholars have been rethinking the cult of domesticity and the gendered separation of spheres for some time, she insists that they have not realized the extent to which women were engaged in economic pursuits. Despite the rhetorical separation of spheres and all the proscriptions reducing women to utter subjection, a significant portion, including middle-class women, argues Warren, earned their own money or were directly involved in monetary pursuits.	1
How does she advance this argument? By drawing on a stunning array of sources, which include the discarded records of the New York Supreme Court, rescued by Leo Hershkowitz and donated to Hofstra University. These records come from a New York City court of original jurisdiction where all sorts of civil and largely economic matters were adjudicated, where women regularly appeared as plaintiffs and defendants, and where divorce suits were tried. Claiming to have read more that 2,500 of these uncatalogued cases running from 1845 to 1875 and paralleling the married women's property acts, Warren interweaves them with a variety of nonlegal sources. After devoting one chapter to a single divorce case, she juxtaposes chapters based on a larger sampling of legal records with those devoted to female novelists and feminist reformers. At the core of her analysis is a series of stories, both legal and fictional, that collectively provide a counternarrative to "the dominant discourse."	. . .

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