Overview

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from ""civilised"" society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving ""special damage."" Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement. In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called ""whores."" Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents. The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal ""civilised"" New World.

Full Product Details

9781503644694

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Reviews

""Lake's research is fascinating--and impeccable. Earlier scholars have made clear that slander and its regulation were gendered but Lake takes this much farther by showing the immense significance of the need for 'special damage' to be shown for a complainant to succeed. She also reveals how this requirement traveled around the common-law world, being addressed differently in various locations. A rollicking and satisfying read!"" --Nancy F. Cott, Harvard University ""This is yet another triumph for legal historian Jessica Lake. With rich details, Lake shows how nineteenth-century women challenged law's indifference to sexual shaming and ultimately prevailed. Their struggles and triumphs help us understand the latest frontiers of gendered slander--deepfake sex imagery and cyber gender harassment--and law's potential to combat them."" --Danielle Keats Citron, University of Virginia School of Law

Author Information

Jessica Lake is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, in the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits (2016).

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