Belonging to the World: Women's Rights and American Constitutional Culture surveys the treatment of women in American law from the nation's earliest beginnings in British North America to the present. Placing the legal history of women in the broader social, political, and economic context of American history, this book examines the evolution of women's constitutional status in the United States, the development of rights consciousness among women, and their attempts to expand zones of freedom for all women. This is the first general account of women and American constitutional...

Taking their cue from the late Paul L. Murphy, one of our nation's leading legal historians, this illustrious group of scholars argues that the field of constitutional history is "too important to be left solely to lawyers and judges." Their "state-of-the-field" volume reclaims constitutional history's rightful place as a vital and necessary part of our intellectual enterprise, in part by pushing the field onto fresh, even controversial, terrain. The result is a provocative new look at the past, present, and future of American constitutionalism, one that opens a window on the larger American...