Book Description

The year: 1811. The place: Edinburgh, Scotland. A student accuses her school mistresses of having sex together. This leads to the immediate withdrawal of all their students and the collapse of their school. To clear their names - which are all they have left - they sue for libel. Drawing on original sources and her own informed imagination, noted feminist scholar Lillian Faderman reconstructs this real-life drama, which inspired Lillian Hellman's Broadway hit The Children's Hour. In court transcripts we follow the witnesses' contradictory testimony. In the judges' notes we see how men interpreted women's behavior in light of their prejudices. Through the testimony of the students of the school we learn about the social and sexual pressures that shaped the lives of nineteenth-century women. And in her personal reflections the author explains the meaning of these events for all women today. The result is a remarkable and gripping work of scholarship, a moving human drama that reveals life as it was truly lived in the nineteenth-century. For this challenge to the honor of two teachers raised troubling issues of class and justice, of social order, of whether or not women were sexual beings, capable of feeling the same desires and needs as men. Provocative and innovative, Scotch Verdict is a brilliant illumination of a crucial moment in women's history. -- from back cover.