This article is a case study of female litigants acting in the capacity of mother in the English equity court of Chancery between 1550 and 1700. It starts by asking how prevalent mothers were as plaintiffs and defendants in Chancery, though the burden of the article is a qualitative analysis of maternal narratives in Chancery pleadings and the use of gendered tropes such as “poor mother.” Stepmothers and women acting in loco parentis—aunts, grandmothers, and godmothers—have been included to reflect the full range of women who acted in a maternal role in early modern society and explain how they were portrayed, sometimes through a querelle des femmes lens. The different legal strategies of mothers (and their lawyers) are examined in detail and the question of the “female voice” in the archives is addressed. The intention is to demonstrate how social and legal maternal identities were used to produce strategic storytelling by mothers and their lawyers in a rhetoric that they hoped would advantage their cases. More broadly, the article addresses questions about the structural connections between law and society, especially the construction of social identity and the habitus and doctrine of equity.

Early modern women are often categorized by historians in relation to their marital status—whether they appeared as single, married, or widowed women. These identifications reflected the effects of marriage on women's legal and social status. Focusing on the records of the burgh and commissary courts of seventeenth-century Glasgow, this article shows how Scottish women's legal status existed instead on a “marital spectrum,” including liminal phases prior to the formation of marriage as well as overlapping phases following remarriage after the death of a spouse. This spectrum situates women's legal claims in relation to their marital career, allowing for a closer reading of women's legal activities. Court clerks working in Glasgow documented women's varied marital, familial, and legal identities within the court records, a Scottish practice that can shed new light on how women negotiated the boundaries of justice in early modern courts of law.

In 1965, the Australian government and Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (AETT) debated which performing arts ensembles should represent Australia at the London Commonwealth Arts Festival. The AETT proposed the newly formed Aboriginal Theatre, comprising songmakers, musicians, and dancers from the Tiwi Islands, northeast Arnhem Land and the Daly River. The government declined, and instead sent the Sydney Symphony Orchestra performing works by John Antill and Peter Sculthorpe. In examining the historical context for these negotiations, I demonstrate the direct relationship between the historical promotion of ‘Australianist’ art music composition that claimed to represent Aboriginal culture, and the denial of the right of representation to Aboriginal performers as owners of their musical traditions. Within the framing of Wolfe's settler colonial theory and ‘logic of elimination’, I suggest that appropriative Australian art music has directly sought to replace performances of Aboriginal culture by Aboriginal people, even while Aboriginal people have resisted replacement.

Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the multiple difficulties that researchers face in distinguishing women's contributions from those of lawyers in legal records, and argues that the artificial nature of legal processes complicates conceptions of “authentic” female voices. It suggests ways to address methodological problems and concludes that focusing on multiple voices and processes of collaboration may bear more fruit than seeking to extract individual women's private thoughts and words.