In the lean and tightly focused Women before the Court, Lindsey Moore distills the complex thicket of laws affecting women and their property in England and its American colonies over two centuries. Where protection for their persons and their property was concerned, women in England had distinct legal advantages, thanks in large part to their access to equity and ecclesiastical as well as common law jurisdictions. The simplified versions of English law that emerged in the colonies tended to constrain women's legal personhood, protections, and strategic options, a pattern most notable in the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies, which adopted English common law and largely eschewed both ecclesiastical and equity jurisdictions. Cleaving more closely to the English model, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina offered women in those colonies at least some of the alternatives to common law that prevailed in England. In the Anglo-American world, while wealthy women had more options than poor women, and serving women than enslaved women, English women had the legal edge over their sisters in the southern colonies, who in turn had multiple legal options denied to their sisters in New England and even in the Mid-Atlantic colonies. As Moore makes clear, the relative advantages of free and serving women in the Chesapeake stemmed in large part from its demographics: short life spans and multiple remarriages helped produce the conditions in which women could amass control over considerable amounts of property, but only at the price of serial bereavement, whereas the growing numbers of enslaved women had no legal recourse whatever against abuse in English law, in contrast to the Spanish and French jurisdictions.

Moore's second major line of argument concerns change over time in the legal premises on which women asserted and courts upheld their rights. Before and during the seventeenth century, legal understandings of wives’ and servants’ rights reflected notions of patriarchy as a system of reciprocal obligations whose fulfillment supposedly guaranteed social order. The patriarchal ideal required men to provide for wives, children, servants, and other dependents, and when husbands, sons, or masters failed to do so, wives, mothers, and servants protested and protected themselves at law—or tried to. Women in England and the southern colonies were increasingly able to use the law to protect their interests from the early seventeenth through the late eighteenth century. As more people became enmeshed in the commercial economy as renters, borrowers, lenders, and mortgagors, married women gained opportunities to manage property, while the profusion of contracts undermined patriarchy's ability to pattern familial relationships. In elite English families, judges increasingly interpreted marriage settlements and similar documents as binding husbands to fulfill their financial engagements, even in the case of a wife who lived openly with another man.

Combining a descriptive statistical analysis with qualitative interpretations, Moore bases her study on an examination of almost six thousand cases and over five hundred petitions. Chapter 1 lays the foundation by defining the English legal jurisdictions and surveying their modified appearance in the colonies. Chapter 2 provides a quantitative analysis in legal trends in women's appearance at law in three seventeenth-century jurisdictions, arguing that, while the overall percentage of female litigants remained low, growing numbers resorted to the law, and more than half of the ecclesiastical cases featured women as either plaintiffs or defendants. Chapter 3 examines the legal status of female servants and slaves in the seventeenth century, demonstrating that, while enslaved women had no independent legal identity, servants had rights both in their own estimation and in that of the judges to whom they brought their grievances about abusive masters and mistresses. Chapter 4 looks at the legal position of wives, midwives, and mothers. When women complained of breaches of the patriarchal bargain, courts typically required husbands to provide for their wives and fathers for their children, even those born out of wedlock. Chapter 5 examines elite women, using women's legal and familial correspondence to figure out how much these women knew about the law and how they participated in litigation. Here, Moore makes perhaps her clearest use of the wider socioeconomic context. Land scarcity in England produced many legal quarrels, as long-lived widows and heirs vied for control over estates. In the Chesapeake, by contrast, ample land, early death, and frequent remarriages prompted the creation of trusts to protect widows’ access to and control over property. Chapter 6 looks at the evolution of equity in the eighteenth century and the increasingly contractual interpretation of familial bonds when property disputes led to lawsuits.

Women before the Court offers much to scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Moore offers especially convincing evidence that elite women conducted their own business and legal correspondence and preserved their papers because they knew they might one day need to present them in court. Where less privileged women are concerned, Moore suggests that women's own words persist in documents written by clerks and scribes. I would have liked to see Moore tackle this critical evidentiary argument at greater length to help readers learn to identify the signs of women's own words and legal strategies in documents they did not write. This book may be considered required reading for scholars of women, family, property, commerce, and law in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-America. It also provides a valuable comparative overview for scholars working on the same topics in other countries and regions. For its brevity, helpful exposition of many legal complexities, long time frame, and comparative structure, Women before the Court could also make an excellent choice as a classroom text.