Legal History Commons^™

The legal history of women and gender is a crucial and radical project that seeks to rewrite the dominant legal narratives that we tell about the development of law and the role that law has played. It is in part about how law shapes culture and society and how society and culture shape law. Crucial to any understanding of law, culture, and society is how gender functions. Yet gender is a slippery term that is at once historically contingent, malleable, shifting, and unstable. This indeterminacy makes gender such a rich mode of analysis.' Creating a women's or gendered legal history …

This Article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, settlement houses were particularly important and vibrant legal sites, in which women settlement workers played groundbreaking and multiple legal roles.' Settlement houses created a geographical and intellectual space where diverse parties participated in analyzing, examining, discussing, popularizing, producing, and reforming law. More broadly, settlement houses were part of a rich and prolific urban legal environment that produced and prompted legal innovation and experimentation. Surprisingly, however, legal scholars have almost entirely neglected the groundbreaking legal work that settlement houses performed. Such neglect results in an impoverished understanding of fin-de-siecle legal …