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Podcast: New Books in Women's History
Episode: Jessica Lake, "Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law" (Stanford UP, 2025)
Description: 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: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law (Stanford University Press, 2025), Dr. Jessica Lake offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, ve...