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Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions (review)

minor quibbles with a work that provides great insight into the cycle by which folklore and custom become law and order. Crane has selected remarkable stories and pieced together an incredible array of detail from the available documents. One wonders how many records she had to read to get to these selected—and particularly juicy—ones. At the same time, the writing makes you forget that each of these tiny details (where on the street a house was, how old someone was at the time of her third child’s birth, how closely related one branch of a family was to another) was meticulously researched and documented. Crane has plumbed the depths of the archives—census and tax data, indictments, lists of judges and jurors, and newspaper and other published accounts—to flesh out the stories of these individuals and their communities. Contemporary handwringing frequently bemoans the lawsuithappy nature of American culture today; if anything, this book serves to show that such a legalistic predisposition is not new to the twentieth or twentyfirst centuries. As Crane notes, “Americans were keenly interested in and influenced by legalities” (2), and legal institutions had profound effects on the everyday lives of common people. Crane’s chapters show that “[p]eople appear to have been informed about what the law demanded of them, as well as their rights under the legal system they devised and lived by. They were also aware of the ways they could circumvent the law and even ignore it, should they choose to do so” (205). It really isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that Law and Order: Seventeenthand EighteenthCentury America would be a very entertaining and strangely familiar program.