Book Review

For the uninitiated, the subject of Puritan law in New England conjures up the image of self-righteous men hanging witches, banishing heretics, and sentencing sinners to humiliating, corporal punishments. Cornelia Hughes Dayton's insightful and innovative study of women and law during and after Connecticut's Puritan regime paints a much different picture. Dayton is not an apologist for the Puritans, but rather a subtle observer of how changes in colonialism shaped the experience of women before a judicial system that, prior to 1710, allowed women's voices to be heard. After 1710, as the colony became "anglicized," making itself over in England's legal image, women's presence before the bar became less frequent. As a result, women's complaints, testimony, and concerns were pushed aside to make way for a male dominated legal and public sphere.	1
What made the Puritans comparatively good listeners to women's voices? The courts in New Haven Colony and Connecticut Colony often functioned as forums for the mediation of disputes, not the contentious presentations of England's common law courts. Moreover, the concerns of the Puritans for civic and familial godliness made them take the word of a woman seriously in cases of slander, sexual infractions, and divorce. Women were the "helpmeets" of men, not their adversaries, and courts tried to restore harmony and equilibrium when they could. The attitudes of Puritan judges in the most common cases before the court helped ensure the protection of a woman's reputation, the equal punishment of sexual transgressors in fornication, adultery, and adult incest, and the granting of divorces for desertion. In Puritan patriarchal society, men were held accountable for sexual license and for failing to live up to their duties as heads of families. Although cruelty was not a recognized ground for divorce in the Puritan era, there were those who thought cruelty to a wife was a type of desertion. That form of patriarchy did not survive the decline of Puritanism, but instead was replaced by a society in which men and women had different roles and obeyed different rules.	2
In one of the most interesting chapters of the book, Dayton shows how the seventeenth-century judiciary generally accepted an ordinary woman's word regarding her sexual behavior and a man's use of force in cases of rape. Indeed, the presumption of the court was that the accused man was the one prone to lie about his conduct. Gradually the belief that women were likely to accuse men falsely of rape became the norm in the eighteenth century as the court system changed and as English treatises by Matthew Hale and William Blackstone influenced the legal profession. In the eighteenth century, white men of the community were not convicted of rape based on a woman's word. Only when outsiders (African, Indian, or foreign men) were accused was there a possibility of conviction.	3
Dayton's evidence for her thesis is based on court records relating to New Haven, from the highest court to the lowest, or the most specialized. She has documented every divorce case, for example, and provides useful tables that buttress individuals' stories with larger trends. One potential problem is that even when one has all the divorce cases, there are not many. Thus, between 1711 and 1729, women made up 83 percent of all petitioners for divorce. The number of women who filed for divorce was five. Fortunately for the reader, Dayton presents her evidence well. The book is thoroughly researched and the conclusions she draws are reasonable. She relies not only on numbers to document change over time, but also uses the supporting court papers to substantiate her claims.	4
Dayton's evidence helps round out a picture of colonial life that recent intellectual histories, including those using gender as an analytical tool, have not touched. While sermons may have contained gendered messages that put additional burdens on women's psyches, Dayton's examples explore how women spoke about their lives in front of their magistrates. The women before the bar seem less like a weaker sex than is generally portrayed. While women used language to acknowledge the power of the court and sometimes presented themselves as helpless, the tenacity with which women pursued court remedies in the seventeenth century is remarkable. Even as the odds that women would prevail in cases shifted in the eighteenth century, it took several decades before women collectively understood that the courtroom had become less accessible.	5
Also of great value is Dayton's mastery of several areas of scholarship, including legal history, women's history, and feminist theory. The first two chapters in particular comprise a tapestry of historiography that could stand alone as introductions to several fields. While these chapters have less primary evidence than the later chapters, their inclusion provides the reader with a master narrative that gives deeper meaning to her particular findings. As a reader, my only unfulfilled wish was that there had been an epilogue of some kind to give closure to the subject on a par with its introduction.	6
Women before the Bar is a welcome legal history, sophisticated in its presentation of the law, fascinating in its presentation of the past. The "anglicization" thesis that has emerged in several works over the last three decades either attracts or repels historians. It is perhaps most appropriately applied to law and the legal profession. Dayton's argument that anglicization had a detrimental effect upon women is one that deserves careful consideration. It not only contests the dominant picture of the eighteenth century as a time of legal improvements to an irrational and superstitious system; it makes one think about the continuing legacy of that change for today's legal system. Professors looking for a readable text for graduate courses in legal history or colonial America should consider this book. Law professors teaching the basic criminal law class should consider using the chapter on rape as a demonstration that certain presumptions are not immutable or eternal. Women before the Bar is a book that will engage readers for a long time to come.	7
Katherine Hermes Central Connecticut State University

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