Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law

In 1788, Mary Smith was ruined and banished from ＂civilised＂ society when her neighbor accused her of carrying a bastard child. To silence the ruinous rumors and vindicate her name, Smith sued him for defamation. But in court, she faced the onerous burden, entrenched within English law of sexual slander, of proving ＂special damage.＂ Smith should have lost her case, but her action set off a remarkable reform movement.

In Special Damage, Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across 19th-century America, Australia, and England. Drawing upon original archival material, she tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called ＂whores.＂ Lake reveals, for the first time, the cases brought by women that spurred and benefitted from these reforms. In doing so, she details how debates about women, speech, and reputation circulated through transnational common law networks, connecting countries, colonies, and continents.

The Slander of Women movement furthered legal protections for women, but also created links between ideas of whiteness, femininity, chastity, and civilization. Special Damage tells a compelling story that questions the costs and compromises of legal progress in a patriarchal and unequal ＂civilised＂ New World.

Jessica Lake is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, in the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits (2016).