Definition
In legal usage, "she" functions as a third-person singular feminine pronoun referring to a previously identified or contextually understood female person, entity, or legally personified subject. Its legal significance arises in the interpretation of instruments, statutes, and pleadings where the antecedent must be identified with precision and where questions of gender-specific versus gender-neutral application may arise.
In modern statutory interpretation, many jurisdictions have adopted rules of construction providing that singular pronouns of any gender include all genders, effectively neutralizing "she" as a limiting term in legislation. In instruments such as wills, deeds, and contracts, however, the pronoun's antecedent can carry substantive legal weight where the identity of the referenced person is disputed.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A female.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The female person, animal, or personified object understood or previously referred to; also used substantively to mean a woman or female.
The common and legal meanings are essentially continuous, with one practical gap: in legal instruments, the precision of the antecedent matters in ways that ordinary conversation does not require. Where common usage tolerates ambiguity about whom "she" refers to, legal construction demands that the antecedent be identifiable with certainty, and disputes about that identification can determine the outcome of a case.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research challenge with "she" is not the pronoun itself but its antecedent. In historical instruments and pleadings, identifying to whom "she" refers is often a gateway to resolving questions of standing, capacity, inheritance rights, or liability. When reading older case reporters and equity proceedings, researchers should be alert to the pronoun's use in describing parties whose formal names appear only at the caption, while the body of the document relies entirely on pronoun reference.
Statutory construction is the second area of concern. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century statutes frequently used "he" as the universal pronoun, and courts developed doctrines addressing whether such statutes included women. The reverse problem — statutes using "she" to describe a role or office historically held by women — is rarer but does appear in domestic relations and household service contexts. Researchers using the Law Mind corpus should note that pronoun usage in historical sources often reflects social assumptions about who could hold a particular legal status rather than any deliberate exclusion or inclusion.
A third concern involves entities personified as feminine. Ships, nations, and (in some literary legal traditions) the law itself have been referred to with feminine pronouns. When such personification appears in a legal instrument or judgment, it ordinarily carries no substantive gendered legal consequence, but researchers should not mistake stylistic personification for a reference to a natural person.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary does not provide a direct entry for "she." The source material attributed to Burrill in the corpus references "seysitus; seised; possessed of," which appears to be a misalignment of source material rather than a substantive treatment of the pronoun. Burrill offers no usable definition here.
Historical legal dictionaries generally do not treat common grammatical particles and pronouns as independent headwords, reserving dictionary space for terms of art. This silence is itself informative: "she" was understood to carry its ordinary linguistic meaning into legal texts, with questions about its scope handled under rules of statutory construction and instrument interpretation rather than as a matter of definitional legal vocabulary.
Jurisdictional Note
Most U.S. jurisdictions and the federal government have enacted rules of construction providing that words importing one gender include all genders unless context requires otherwise. Researchers working with pre-twentieth-century materials should not assume modern neutralizing rules apply retroactively to the instruments or statutes under examination.