Présentation de l’éditeur

A collection of essays that use archival records of legal processes to piece together a picture of daily life across varied identities and lived experiences.

Legal archives offer extraordinary opportunities for understanding intimacies across time and space. Family and Justice in the Archives presents a series of fascinating historical essays that unpack stories of familial, domestic, and sexual intimacy from the records left behind by legal processes, providing rich new insights about family, gender, race, sex, culture, identity, and daily life.

Contributors examine the written traces left by public proceedings that occurred in legally sanctioned spaces of social regulation, from notaries’ offices to criminal and civil courtrooms to legislatures. Focusing on the past two centuries and spanning five continents, the essays explore a wide range of topics including marriage, citizenship, inheritance, indentured servitude, infanticide, juvenile justice, parental abuse, bigamy, and sex work. Mindful of the ethical questions that arise when scrutinizing the details of people’s most vulnerable moments, these authors also demonstrate how individuals navigated and sometimes challenged legal prescriptions and processes to address systemic imbalances of power.

Family and Justice in the Archives reveals the wealth of detail that emerges from a close reading of documents generated by legal processes in the past, offering valuable new perspectives on the complex personal lives of so-called ordinary people in former times.

Peter Gossage is a professor in the Department of History at Concordia University

Lisa Moore is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Concordia University

Sommaire

Introduction. Family and Justice in the Archives: Historical Perspectives on Intimacy and the Law

Peter Gossage and Lisa Moore

Part 1: Colonial Encounters

1 Land Ownership and Inheritance among the Abenaki of Odanak: The Process of Family Reproduction in the Gill Household. Isabelle Bouchard

2 Inheritance and the Indian Act: Political Action and Women’s Property on Southern Ontario Indian Reserves, 1857–1900. Chandra Murdoch

3 Strangers before the Law: The Intimate Lives of Indian Indentured Labourers in Colonial Mauritius.  Riyad Sadiq Koya

4 The Materiality and Visuality of Intimacy in a South African Colonial Archive.  Lorena Rizzo

Part 2: Intergenerational Justice

5 Administering Minor Children’s Inheritance: Domestic Authority and Masculinities in Lower Canada, 1825–1835. Jean-Philippe Garneau 

6 Wayward Daughters and Unnatural Fathers: Generational Conflict, Youth Culture, and Parental Authority in Buenos Aires, 1890–1930. Juandrea Bates

7 Unfit and Unworthy: Parental Delinquency in Progressive-Era Juvenile Justice. Naama Maor 

Part 3: Intimacies in the Courtroom

8 Intimacies in the Neighbourhood: Revisiting Sex Commerce, Families, and Criminal Court Records in Early Nineteenth-Century Montreal. Mary Anne Poutanen

9 Improper Intimacies, Impossible Promises, and the Prerogatives of Patriarchy: Family and Justice in Nineteenth-Century Criminal Courts in Canada’s North-West Territories. Shelley A.M. Gavigan

10 Civil Law, Mental Capacity, and Masculinity in Transnational Context. Emma Chilton and James Moran 

Part 4: Marriage Regulation

11 Bigamy Prosecutions in Victoria, Australia: The Press Coverage and the Case Files. Mélanie Méthot 

12 “Quite English, Except by Marriage”: British-Born Wives in Transnational Families in Britain, 1914–1927. Ginger Frost 

13 The “Moscow Widowers”: Marriage, Citizenship, and the Soviet Wives of British Subjects in the Aftermath of the Second World War. Gail Savage

Part 5: Everyday Violence

14 Suffering for Compassion: Everyday Violence and Infanticide in Ontario, 1820-1920s. Jane Nicholas

15 Despicable Fathers: Constructing the Image of France’s Poor and Incestuous Pères Infâmes, 1804–1889. Fabienne Giuliani 

16 Violence against Women, the Law, and Public Opinion in Guatemala. Emilee Lord and John Wertheimer