ABSTRACT
The judicial archives of New France (both civil and criminal) reveal a remarkable presence of women of all types and status. For the Royal Jurisdiction of Montreal alone, between 1693 and 1760, 1,259 different women, including married and single, religious and lay, free blacks and slaves, Indigenous and panis, acted on their own account in the 4,338 dossiers involving women. Women thus made up two-thirds of the people involved in litigation, appearing not merely as victims but more often as plaintiffs in an era when the legal capacity of women had been reduced by the Coutume de Paris. Prescriptive law may have been patriarchal and posed a barrier to the activity of women, but as this chapter argues, the law also permitted a substantial female presence at all levels of the judicial system. The values and social practices of a range of individuals from different social classes are highlighted through two case studies of litigious Montrealers in eighteenth-century New France.
