ABSTRACT
The flowering of the new legal history and of women's history in the 1970s seemed to carry the promise of a new women's legal history. The new legal history emphasized the relation between law and the social process, and women's history placed women at the very center of historical inquiry. Focusing on the states instead of the federal government, Lawrence M. Friedman produced an overview of American law that took gender into account. 1 From a comparative Anglo-American perspective, Albie Sachs and Joan Hoff-Wilson created a provocative outline of the legal history of women replete with periodization and key issues—an implicit challenge for further research. 2 Despite these forays and much earlier ones by Richard B. Morris and Mary Ritter Beard, 3 for the first decade most work in the new legal history ignored women, and most work in women's history dealt with law tangentially at best. A formidable gulf separated the two fields. Recently, however, a considerable amount of scholarship on women and the law has emerged. Some of the recent scholarship has begun to bridge the gulf and stimulate speculation on the problems and possibilities of building other new bridges. Focusing on the years between the American Revolution and the Progressive Era, this essay explores the literature in three pivotal areas of law: married women's property rights, divorce, and constitutional developments. These topics by no means represent the entire field of women's legal history, but they are areas in which women's legal relationships to family and state clearly have been redefined. Some of the work included here does not have law narrowly construed as its primary focus since the legal history of women in the United States has evolved primarily within the framework of women's history.
