Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

by Kathleen S. Sullivan

While the United States was founded on abstract principles of certain "unalienable rights," its legal traditions are based in British common law, a fact long decried by progressive reformers. Common law, the complaint goes, ignores abstract rights principles in favor of tradition, effectively denying equality to large segments of the population.

The nineteenth-century women's rights movement embraced this argument, claiming that common law...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801885523
• ISBN13: 9780801885525
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.2"