Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada by Constance Backhouse (review)

Petticoats, whether the ‘cedar bark’ variety … or … elegant undergarments ... were the hallmark of femininity in the nineteenth century. To wear them was to encounter different treatment and prejudice within the irrefutably male legal system.

(p. xxiii)

In this book Constance Backhouse illuminates the experience of women with the law in the nineteenth century in such a way that makes her actors vividly accessible as ‘heroines’ within their stories. The book combines the intimate narratives of individual women complainants, defendants, and protagonists with a clear and engaging contextualisation of their experience within the wider legal, political, and social historical framework. To read this book is to be engaged and feel empathy for the womens’ struggle with and within the nineteenth-century legal system.

Backhouse reflects that the conception of this work was not ‘well-suited to inclusivity’ since ‘most non-white women … did not find their struggles recorded by white legal scribes’ (p. xxii). Yet her work is nuanced and adopts a clear intersectional approach as she addresses the significance of class, religion, and ethnicity to her subjects’ experience. This ranged from the contribution of the relative success of Clara Brett Martin, the first woman admitted to the legal profession in the British Commonwealth, who in class and race ‘resembled the men already in the profession’ (p. 397), to the harassment and differentially harsh sentences given to prostitutes ‘not of the dominant race, religion or ethnic group’ (p. 291). The book explores a number of case studies through ten chapters divided into four parts which focus on: marriage and sexual violence; fertility; the family; and women’s work. These are framed by an engaging introduction and generous conclusion which pulls together the themes explored within the substance of the chapters. The text provides detailed end notes providing additional information as well as sources, a selected bibliography, and a very useful index.

At the time of its first publication in 1991 this book was recognised as ground breaking, a leader in its field and was awarded the Willard Hurst Prize in American Legal History. Backhouse established a methodology and approach that has been widely adopted to good effect by subsequent authors. As the Osgoode Society note, Constance Backhouse showed that you could write the ‘history of ordinary and often repressed people’ (p. xii) in a way that had broad appeal. It is wonderful that this book has now been reissued as a Women’s Press Classic text. It achieved its author’s original aim of reaching out ‘beyond the small circle of legal history scholars’ (p. xii, 1991) to engage scholars of women’s studies, and political and social history as well as general audiences. Now its reissue will only broaden its spread still further and allow a new generation of readers to immerse themselves in these important case studies.