BOOK TALK 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 this presentation, Lake will provide an overview of and examples from her new book Special Damage, which offers a comparative legal history of gendered hate speech, verbal abuse, and sexual harassment across the common law world. Drawing upon original archival material, Lake tracks the creation of the Slander of Women reforms that made it easier for women to sue when called “whores.” She 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.

Dr Jessica Lake is a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She researches and
publishes in the areas of privacy, defamation and technology law, past and present. Her first book, The Face that Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: the American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. Her second book, Special Damage: The Slander of Women and the Gendered History of Defamation Law, will be published with Stanford University Press in December 2025. In 2016 and 2017, she was the Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Political Science and Jurisprudence at Amherst College, Massachusetts. In 2022, she was awarded a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award by the Australian Research Council. Prior to academia, Jessica practiced for several years as a media and intellectual property lawyer.