The American Society for Legal History (ASLH) has awarded the Donald Sutherland Prize for 2005 to an article published in the Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal:  Professor Danya C. Wright’s  “ ‘Well-Behaved Women Don't Make History’: Rethinking English Family, Law, and History,” 19 Wis. Women's L.J. 211 (Fall 2004). Wright is a professor of law at the University of Florida, Levin College of Law.

The Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2005.

In awarding the honor, the ASLH commented that the article

“offers not only a compelling analysis of the historical experience of law by women in nineteenth-century England, but an ambitious, philosophically complex assessment of the limits of familylaw as a guarantor of women's rights. The article's arguments rest upon an impressive base of primary research in the National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office): Wright has used quantitative data on the operation of the Divorce Court in the 1850s and 1860s to examine legal outcomes with regard to issues such as separation and divorce, child custody and alimony.  Her findings highlight the significance to legal outcomes of factors such as stage of marriage -- which exerted a
crucial impact upon rates of judicial separation relative to divorce and
the success of custody orders. In themselves, these data add significant
new dimensions to our understanding of the operation of the reformed
court systems of the Victorian era. But the importance of Wright's article is far more broad than this, for her article provides a sustained and trenchant critique of the "liberalization narrative" of family law, the dominant tradition of interpretation that celebrates the nineteenth-century evolution of legal practices that recognize and protect women's special interests in the family, as opposed to the public sphere.

“By scrutinizing data from the first decade of the Divorce Court's
operation, Wright is able to mount a convincing attack on the
liberalization narrative. Her data and analysis suggest that the legal
reforms that gave rise to family law were ultimately destructive of
women's legal and economic interests: by protecting women's special
interests, the new family law tradition perpetuated their relegation to
an inferior domestic sphere. This is a thought-provoking article that
will doubtless provoke continued debate within legal history for years
to come.”

Submitted by on December 23, 2005

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