Women, Race, and the Law in Early America

Abstract

Everywhere across European and Indigenous settlements in 17th- and 18th-century North America and the Caribbean, the law or legal practices shaped women’s status and conditioned their dependency, regardless of race, age, marital status, or place of birth. Historians have focused much of their attention on the legal status, powers, and experiences of women of European origin across the colonies and given great consideration to the law of domestic relations, the legal disabilities of coverture, and women’s experiences as plaintiffs and defendants, both civil and criminal, in colonial courts. Early American legalities, however, differed markedly for women of color—whether free, indentured, or enslaved, and whether Native or African in origin or descent—whose relationships to the legal regimes of early America were manifold and complex. In their status under the law, experiences at the bar, and, as a result, positions in household polities, women of color reckoned with a set of legalities that differed from those of their European counterparts. The diversity of women’s experiences of the law was shaped not only by race but also by region: Indigenous people had what one historian has labeled jurispractices, while Europeans brought and created a jurisprudence of race and status that shaped treatments of women of color across imperial spaces. A widely comparative analysis of women and the law reflects ways in which race shaped women’s status under and experiences of the law as well as the legalities of their marriages in pre-Revolutionary America.

Y Haplogroup Diversity of the Dominican Republic: Reconstructing the Effect of the European Colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trades

“…change of ethnicity affiliation) and there were no consequences for European men for having children with native or African women, with a high rate of illegitimacy. Other elements of social fluidity were the fact that, according to the Iberian legislation, Native Americans were not officially slaves, African slaves could be freed under some circumstances and the mixed individuals were recognized with a distinct status ( Wade 2009 ; Snyder 2015 ; Adhikari et al. 2017 ).…”

Feminist Perspectives on Disaster, Pandemics, and Intimate Partner Violence

“…In colonial and former colonial nations, women of color suffer even more dire sexual harassment, sexual assaults, and other forms of discrimination against women (Snyder 2015). Much sexual discrimination results from belief systems that to varying extents view women as property.…”

The Genetic Diversity of the Americas

“…Furthermore, the strongly patriarchal nature of colonial society meant that it was of little consequence for European men to have children out of wedlock, and rates of illegitimacy (usually involving European men and Native or African women) throughout this period were high (53). In relation to African admixture, although slaves (i.e., Africans, as Native Americans were not legally enslaved in Ibero-America) were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, Iberian slavery legislation (rooted in ancient Roman law) allowed for manumission under a range of circumstances, adding another element of fluidity to colonial society (44,91,102). As a result of the rapid increase in the admixed population (who by the eighteenth century were in many places predominant), Iberian law recognized a distinct status for individuals of mixed ancestry, (separate from that of European immigrants, their descendants, natives, or slaves), even attempting to codify a wide range of mixed ancestries (denoted castas in the Spanish Empire).…”

“…Continuing this policy after independence, the western expansion of the United States was often carried out at the expense of Native American populations, who were decimated or forcibly displaced so that they could be replaced with European immigrants (54,104). British slavery legislation was stricter than the Iberian in terms of imposing segregation and restrictions on slaves (44,91), as well as more drastic in terms of preventing marriage or sex between Europeans and non-Europeans (43,91). Following the abolition of slavery in 1865, racial segregation legislation was reintroduced in southern US states (which had harbored most of the slave population) in the 1870s and further codified in the early twentieth century.…”