Gender in the path of the law: Public bodies, state power, and the politics of reform in late nineteenth-century New York City

This work joins a growing body of scholarship that re-narrates and challenges key aspects of our received knowledge of late nineteenth-century law. Using gender as a category of analysis, each of the chapters examines a traditional topic of concern for legal historians, situates it within the political, economic, and legal landscape of post-1860s New York City and explores the role that gender played. It also insists on the value of increasing the groups and individuals who are understood to be actors in legal history. For instance, it explores how and why an organization of male lawyers provided legal services to working class women; how a group of middle-class women used various nuisance laws and construed themselves as municipal housekeepers; how tenement regulations created an expanded understanding of the reach of the state's police power; and how New York City's settlement houses gave life to the practice of sociological jurisprudence.; The work as a whole demonstrates the presence of a vital public legal sphere and reveals the extraordinary rise of the administrative state in New York City in the second half of the nineteenth century. These findings challenge the presumption that laissez-faire existed as a predominant practice, outside of the upper-echelons of the federal judiciary. It was on the municipal and local level that the new state was built and forcefully inserted itself into everyday life. The work's concentration on New York City is central for it was the post-bellum city that served as fertile terrain for the rise of the bureaucratic regulatory state. Excavating the local allows us to move beyond the courts and high legal culture to uncover a complex array of actors with diverse interests that transformed American law.