Definition
A jurywoman is a female member of a jury. Historically, the term was used most precisely to denote a woman serving on a jury of matrons — a specialized common law body convened to determine questions concerning a woman's pregnancy, typically arising in criminal proceedings where a condemned woman pleaded her belly to delay execution. In modern usage, the term has largely given way to the gender-neutral "juror," but it appears with some frequency in older legal materials and statutes that distinguished jury membership by sex.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A female juror.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not defined as a distinct entry; the term was uncommon in general usage.
The common and legal meanings are largely aligned, but the legal meaning carries a more specific historical charge. In ordinary modern English, "jurywoman" is simply a gendered synonym for "juror." In older legal sources, however, it most often signals a very particular institutional context — the jury of matrons — that has no counterpart in contemporary legal usage. A researcher encountering the term in historical materials should not assume it refers to ordinary jury service.
Common Confusion
JURYWOMAN and JUROR are functionally synonymous in modern law, but conflating them in historical research obscures an important distinction. "Jurywoman" in pre-twentieth-century legal texts often specifically identifies a participant in a jury of matrons rather than a general trial jury. The jury of matrons was an all-female body with a discrete procedural function; its members were not interchangeable with trial jurors. Treating every historical use of "jurywoman" as equivalent to the modern "juror" risks misreading the procedural posture of a case.
Why It Matters in Research
The principal research trap with "jurywoman" is anachronism running in both directions. Reading backward, modern researchers may underestimate how technically specific the term was: in English common law and early American practice, women were generally excluded from ordinary juries, so a "jurywoman" almost by definition meant a member of a jury of matrons, not a deliberating trial juror. Reading forward, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources that begin to use "jurywoman" more loosely — as women's suffrage movements pushed for jury eligibility — represent a genuine transition in meaning that must be tracked carefully.
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note that materials touching women's jury service cluster around two distinct periods and bodies of law: (1) pre-modern equity and criminal procedure sources dealing with the jury of matrons, and (2) twentieth-century civil rights and suffrage-era statutory materials expanding or limiting women's jury eligibility. These are very different legal contexts, and the word alone does not tell you which you are in.
The first Black's edition entry is essentially fragmentary and unhelpful — the source material supplied conflates it with a broader discussion of jus — but the second edition entry is precise and confirms the jury of matrons as the primary legal referent. Cross-referencing entries for JURY OF MATRONS and JUROR will be essential for any substantive research involving this term.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) defines jurywoman simply as "one member of a jury of matrons," which is the cleanest available historical authority and confirms that the term's legal meaning was more restricted than its face value suggests. The first edition entry, as preserved in the source material, is too fragmentary to yield independent meaning; it appears to have been incorporated into a broader discussion rather than given a standalone definition.
No major historical legal dictionary treats "jurywoman" as coextensive with "juror" for general trial purposes. The consistent implication across the shelf is that the term's legal significance was tied to the jury of matrons as a distinct institution. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the term's transitional usage in the early twentieth century, when several American jurisdictions began legislating women's jury eligibility and the word began appearing in statutes and court opinions in a broader sense. Researchers should not rely on Black's alone for materials after approximately 1920.
Jurisdictional Note
Women's eligibility for general jury service varied substantially by American jurisdiction and was not federally resolved until Ballard v. United States (1946) and Taylor v. Louisiana (1975). The meaning and frequency of "jurywoman" in state statutes and case reporters will therefore track each jurisdiction's own timeline of reform. In English materials, the jury of matrons persisted formally until the Criminal Justice Act 1948 effectively abolished it.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Jury of Matrons; Women and Jury Service.