A collection of essays that use archival records of legal processes to piece together a picture of daily life across varied identities and lived experiences
Legal archives offer extraordinary opportunities for understanding intimacies across time and space. Family and Justice in the Archives presents a series of fascinating historical essays that unpack stories of familial, domestic, and sexual intimacy from the records left behind by legal processes, providing rich new insights about family, gender, race, sex, culture, identity, and daily life.
Contributors examine the written traces left by public proceedings that occurred in legally sanctioned spaces of social regulation, from notaries’ offices to criminal and civil courtrooms to legislatures. Focusing on the past two centuries and spanning five continents, the essays explore a wide range of topics including marriage, citizenship, inheritance, indentured servitude, infanticide, juvenile justice, parental abuse, bigamy, and sex work. Mindful of the ethical questions that arise when scrutinizing the details of people’s most vulnerable moments, these authors also demonstrate how individuals navigated and sometimes challenged legal prescriptions and processes to address systemic imbalances of power.
Family and Justice in the Archives reveals the wealth of detail that emerges from a close reading of documents generated by legal processes in the past, offering valuable new perspectives on the complex personal lives of so-called ordinary people in former times.
FAMILY AND JUSTICE IN THE ARCHIVES
Family and Justice in the Archives: Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law
Edited by Peter Gossage & Lisa Moore
464 pages | 13 b&w photos and figures | 6 x 9
9781988111445 | E-book
“Sixteen narratives of scintillating detail unveil legal archives from Canada to Australia, South America to Central America, Europe to Africa. The authors share with readers moments of intimacy unmasked in courtrooms—legal power struggles over two centuries of dominance and resistance within families.” —Constance Backhouse, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa
“This is a strong collection focusing on intimacy, affect, and emotion as viewed through legal archives. The individual stories told by the authors of Family and Justice in the Archives are compelling, moving, and often tragic. The glimpses and contexts of intimacy that they uncover constitute a major strength and unifying force in the collection. And, the narrative approach, based most often around the histories of specific individuals or kinds of court cases, not only unites the chapters but also makes the issues accessible to a wide audience.” —Bettina Bradbury, professor emeritus of history, York University, adjunct professor, Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand
“Family and Justice in the Archives uses archival sources generated by law and legal processes as a window into better understanding numerous aspects of intimate life and family relations. Each chapter is clearly, concisely and thoughtfully written, carefully researched, and will be of interest to social and legal historians, as well as scholars interested in colonialism and post-colonialism, gender, immigration and migration, and suitable for use in graduate or honours seminars.” —Christopher Frank, professor of history, University of Manitoba
The e-book version of this title will be available in Winter 2024.
| Foreword | xix | |
| Introduction: Family and Justice in the Archives: Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law | Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore | 3 |
| Part 1: Colonial Encounters | 23 | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Land Ownership and Inheritance among the Abenaki of Odanak: The Process of Family Reproduction in the Gill Household | Isabelle Bouchard | 25 |
| 2 Inheritance and the Indian Act: Political Action and Women’s Property on Southern Ontario Indian Reserves, 1857–1900 | Chandra Murdoch | 43 |
| 3 Strangers before the Law: The Intimate Lives of Indian Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius | Riyad Sadiq Koya | 63 |
| 4 The Materiality and Visuality of Intimacy in a South African Colonial Archive | Lorena Rizzo | 85 |
| Part 2: Intergenerational Justice | 103 | |
| 5 Administering Minor Children’s Inheritance: Domestic Authority and Masculinities in Lower Canada, 1825–1835 | Jean-Philippe Garneau | 105 |
| 6 Wayward Daughters and Unnatural Fathers: Generational Conflict, Youth Culture, and Parental Authority in Buenos Aires, 1890–1930 | Juandrea Bates | 123 |
| 7 Unfit and Unworthy: Parental Delinquency in Progressive-Era Juvenile Justice | Naama Maor | 141 |
| Part 3: Intimacies in the Courtroom | 159 | |
| 8 Intimacies in the Neighbourhood: Revisiting Sex Commerce, Families, and Criminal Court Records in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal | Mary Anne Poutanen | 161 |
| 9 Improper Intimacies, Impossible Promises, and the Prerogatives of Patriarchy: Family and Justice in Nineteenth-Century Criminal Courts in Canada’s North-West Territories | Shelley A.M. Gavigan | 181 |
| 10 Civil Law, Mental Capacity, and Masculinity in Transnational Context | Emma Chilton and James Moran | 199 |
| Part 4: Marriage Regulation | 217 | |
| 11 Bigamy Prosecutions in Victoria, Australia: The Press Coverage and the Case Files | Mélanie Méthot | 219 |
| 12 “Quite English, Except by Marriage”: British-Born Wives in Transnational Families in Britain, 1914–1927 | Ginger Frost | 239 |
| 13 The “Moscow Widowers”: Marriage, Citizenship, and the Soviet Wives of British Subjects in the Aftermath of the Second World War | Gail Savage | 257 |
| Part 5: Everyday Violence | 273 | |
| 14 Suffering for Compassion: Everyday Violence and Infanticide in Ontario, 1820-1920s | Jane Nicholas | 275 |
| 15 Despicable Fathers: Constructing the Image of France’s Poor and Incestuous Pères Infâmes, 1804–1889 | Fabienne Giuliani | 293 |
| 16 Violence against Women, the Law, and Public Opinion in Guatemala | Emilee Lord and John Wertheimer | 311 |
Peter Gossage is a professor in the Department of History at Concordia University
Lisa Moore is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University
