Petticoats and Prejudices: Women and Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada

James G. Snell is a history professor at the University of Guelph,
author of In the Shadow of the Law: Divorce in Canada, 1900-1939, and
co-author of The Supreme Court of Canada: History of the Institution.

In Petticoats and Prejudice, Backhouse (a University of Western Ontario
professor) has brought the history of the law in Canada to a popular
readership. The author’s reputation as a legal scholar is already well
established by her articles detailing the history of case law regarding
a number of issues vital to the lives of Canadian women in the
nineteenth century. With this book she eschews the normally dry analysis
of leading cases, choosing instead to capture the broader character of
the legal system itself through a small number of interesting cases and
issues that caught the attention of the contemporary public. The cases
she has chosen depict some of the oppressive processes and ideas that
operated to legitimate the gendered values of the time.

This book presents many, but by no means all, of the ways in which the
legal system sought to construct what it was to be a woman in Canada in
the 1800s. The book goes out of its way to encompass the legal
experience of minority women, such as Natives, Asians, and blacks.
Working-class women are contrasted from time to time with those of the
middle class, so that a spectrum of women’s experience is examined.

The issues chosen for study encompass a number of central areas in the
lives of women: sexuality, violence, fertility, marriage, divorce, child
custody, and labor. Unfortunately, this selection omits other areas of
vital concern—particularly property, which is so fundamental to power
relations between the sexes. Nevertheless, this is a welcome and very
effective addition to our understanding of the history of women and the
law in this country. In bringing this history to the general reader,
Backhouse has performed an important service to Canadians.