These are perhaps rather downers, and need content warnings, but of interest, I think
Mary Hockmore’s Lawyer: Marriage Breakdown and Women’s Rights in Seventeenth-Century England: For centuries the English common law rules concerning married women’s rights-known by the shorthand ‘coverture’-restricted a wife’s ability to control real estate, own movable property, enter into contracts or participate in litigation without the cooperation of her husband. Yet, ongoing research confirms that a significant minority of women in broken marriages defied these restrictions and fought lawsuits against their husbands in equity courts. Chancery alone heard thousands of suits pitting spouse against spouse between 1500 and 1800.
However, any kinds of independence they might have achieved was still fragile and precarious.
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Poxed and Ravished: Venereal Disease in Early Modern Rape Trials: [T]he disease offered tangible, if contested, evidence of rape that could be touched, viewed, and evaluated by male - rather than female - medical experts. Venereal disease effectively refocused rape cases away from the kinds of words and bodily inspections that were viewed with suspicion and onto those that were deemed reliable.
A high price to pay for having evidence that was deemed reliable...
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The Ageing Body, Memory-Loss and Suicide in Georgian England: [O]lder people often thought that their suicides were a rational response to the struggles of ageing, which included physical decline and embodied memory-loss. To do this, it uses previously unseen coroners’ inquests from across England, in addition to wills and medical writings. It examines these inquests for what they can tell us about the emotional and embodied experiences of older suicidal people, thus contributing to an under-researched aspect of the social history of ageing.
While it does mention that more men than women were represented in the statistics, it relates that to the 'men do more successful acts of self-slaughter, women more attempts' trope. I wonder - given the discussion around employability and usefulness - whether ageing women were more likely to find a function within offsprings' households doing domestic tasks, minding children, etc (indebted here to Wally Seccombe's Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (1995), suggesting that elderly mothers/mothers-in-law were much less likely to be dumped in the workhouse because they were still useful).
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This is less gloomy, perhaps, but about a transient historical moment: Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures: The Rise and Fall of a Lesbian Social Scene.
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And, in the realm of cheering news, University of Chicago Press is having a 75% reduction on ebooks sale until next Monday. (I would be more chuffed if the catalogue didn't keep defaulting to alphabetical instead of chronological every time I click on a book, and I initially failed to be able to pay for what I ordered because my card was declined, but it didn't actually tell me this was the problem. Also a) I realise I have quite a lot of their books already and b) several of the things I would like are either not in epub or would not really work well thus.)
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