GSWS1123 - Wives, Workers, Widows and Wenches: Women in the Law of Early America

This seminar provides students with an understanding of how legal doctrines shape everyday life on the ground with special attention to the legal condition of women. It offers an overview of the different ways gender (and secondarily, identifiers like race, class and disability) intersected with the law and legal culture in colonial North America and the early Republic. Students will gain a basic understanding of the mechanics of Anglo-American common law but then also, an understanding of how law helps organize society beyond “black letter” (formal) rules. Students will also be asked to think about how gender, as a legal category, has been understood and how that understanding—and its impact on individual lives—has varied depending on context. Finally, the course will encourage students to reflect on how this early history of gender and the law reverberates today in debates over reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, pay equity, and other social and economic rights in modern American society.
This Communication within the Curriculum seminar is open to all regardless of ability.