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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/hisholinessleoxiii on 2024-01-24 13:18:12+00:00.

When I got my bachelor’s degree, I wrote my thesis on the famous “Person’s Case” from 1929. To vastly oversimplify it, women had been appointed as judges and magistrates, and male lawyers challenged the courts on whether or not women were eligible for their positions: the basic argument is that the term “person” in the British North America Act of 1867 (later renamed the Constitution Act, 1867) was meant to only apply to men.

In my research, I kept coming across the same quote over and over: “Women are persons in matters of pains and penalties, but not rights and privileges” with the occasional note that it was from a 19th century ruling. I tried for months to track down the original source of this quote, but I kept running into the same problem where book A would cite book B, which cited book C, which cited book D, which cited book A. In all my research in law libraries and online, I could not find a single source citing the original ruling.

Where did this quote originally come from? What was the case involved?