This book features the insights of scholars from seven different countries, who analyse barriers to gender equality in various domains of European legal history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several contributions focus on women’s access to the legal profession and their position therein. Other contributions discuss the inequality in relation to what is reflected on the level of jurisprudence. The outlook here moves to gender-based structures within the law and how these had an impact on women’s legal status, for instance in property rights, contracting rights and labour rights. Together, the different chapters provide elements of answers to questions that hitherto have been largely ignored by humanities and social science research, but also to questions that are the object of much debate. Does gender make a difference to the way the judiciary and lawyers work or should work?1 How did nineteenth-century law reforms affect married women’s rights in mixed or transitional legal regimes, notably those on the outskirts of Europe? How have reforms affected women’s confidence in the ability of law institutions to deliver justice? How, in sum, did women’s interaction with the law shape the fields of legal history and gender history? The subjects broached remain relevant today. The constitutions of nineteenth-century nation states reserved the right to equality for only one sex, men. From there on it took until the twentieth century for women in Europe to see gender justice formally achieved. Yet barriers to actual equality still exist. In most European countries, for example, there is a more or less pronounced glass ceiling to women’s judicial careers.2 It is therefore meaningful and necessary to uncover the very roots of gender stereotype reasoning and discourses (that sometimes persist until today) and to look at the origins of rules of law that have hindered women in their rights. This book aims to do so.