This book investigates the surprisingly large number of women who participated in the vast expansion of litigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Making use of legal sources, literary texts, and the neglected records of the Court of Requests, it describes women's rights under different jurisdictions, considers attitudes to women going to court, and reveals how female litigants used the law, as well as fell victim to it. In the central courts of Westminster, maidservants sued their masters, widows sued their creditors, and in defiance of a barrage of theoretical prohibitions, wives sued their husbands. The law was undoubtedly discriminatory, but certain women pursued actively such rights as they possessed. Some appeared as angry plaintiffs, while others played upon their poverty and vulnerability. A special feature of this study is the attention it pays to the different language and tactics that distinguish women's pleadings from men's pleadings within a national equity court.

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pp. xiv + 273. ISBN 978 0415358170 (hb); 978 0415358187 (pb).This book considers selected themes in the history of British higher education. Focusing primarily on women students' experiences and on interwar and post-1945 developments, it augments the author 's 1995 study, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities 1870-1939. Part one treats topics relating to university access, students' ambitions and their subsequent occupations. Part two explores how gender issues have influenced women's experience of co-education.The first two chapters deal with interwar developments, introducing valuable data from a survey conducted by the author in the mid-l990s, based on a sample of men and women who attended selected universities other than Oxford and Cambridge before the Second World War. Included is information about students' social origins (more diverse than sometimes supposed), how they funded their education, their career goals and later occupations. Both sexes in the sample pursued university education as a means of securing their socio-economic prospects, although the women students were less likely to arrive at university with well-defined career goals. However, Dyhouse concludes that university education was a more speculative investment for women than for men, owing to women graduates' limited employment options.Chapter three deals with women medical students in the period 1890-1939. Drawing effectively on autobiographical, biographical and interview material, the study identifies background factors and outlooks that encouraged women to pursue a medical career and their strategies for coping with a professional culture with masculine associations. The following chapter addresses the situation of women students just after the Second World War, when the proportion of women students at universities stagnated. There is an engaging account of contemporary concerns, often focusing on images of 'waste' (whether of talent or investment), in a period marked by a trend to early marriage and still limited employment options for women graduates. The next chapter considers the sustained growth in the proportion of women students at universities after 1970. A broad swathe of possible contributing factors is canvassed: institutional changes (for example, cuts in teacher training colleges encouraged more women to apply to university), a fall in fertility rates, feminist influence, legal changes C The author 2007. Journal compilation C Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

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