A studentship is being offered in the School of History at Glasgow on the topic of “Married Women and the Law in Scotland, 1600-1750”. Those who follow such debates will be aware that there has been a lot of controversy over this in English law in recent history, focusing around the significance of what English lawyers called coverture. Social and economic historians know that both married women as well as widows often ran businesses, raising all kinds of very interesting questions. For anyone interested, your blogger would recommend a perusal of Elizabeth Sanderson’s fascinating Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (1996) as an interesting start, showing the variety of work done by women of all classes. This alone raises very interesting questions about married women and the operation of the law. What is offered is an AHRC-funded studentship as part of a very promising project: “Women negotiating the boundaries of justice: Britain and Ireland, c.1100 – c.1750.” The supervisors will Dr Alex Shepherd, who has carried out a lot of work on gender studies particularly concerning England, and Dr Karin Bowie, a noted Scottish historian, who published one of the more interesting specialist books about the Union of 1707.
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