ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss how women’s responses to the legal system helped to shape the law and legal culture in the nineteenth century. For most of the nineteenth century, women in the United States, particularly married women, functioned under legal disabilities imposed by law. In a section on the “Law,” I discuss the most important laws that affected women, while in a section titled “Women’s Sphere,” I explain some of the ways that women were circumscribed by law and tradition. A section on “Education” provides a look at one of the major factors that led to a loosening of restrictions on women and describes the laws that aided in the change. A final section, “Women Writing about the Law,” chronicles what contemporary nineteenth-century women wrote about the law and what laws they focused on, providing insight into how the law affected individual women’s lives.
