In colonial Connecticut between 1670 and 1719, women participated in one of every six civil cases, the vast majority of which were debtrelated. Women's participation dropped to one in ten cases after 1719, and to one in twenty by the 1770's. however, as Cornelia Hughes Dayton notes in Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789, these statistics are somewhat deceptive: in fact, both the absolute numbers and the percentage of adult women participating in civil cases grew steadily throughout the eighteenth century, but the legal activity of men also increased dramatically, and at a much faster rate. Single, married, and widowed women continued to pursue their own and their husbands' debtors through legal action much as they had done in the previous century, but despite this continuity, their place in the legal system shifted dramatically. Men's commercial interests and credit networks became increasingly far-flung, owing in part to the ability of creditors to buy and sell promissory notes (legal promises to pay debts). At the same time, women's networks of credit and debt remained primarily local and personal. Dayton contends that, although still performing crucial economic services in their communities—services that contributed to the commercialization of the colonial economy—women remained for the most part outside the new economic and legal culture of the eighteenth century.

    In addition to conventional galaxies, the universe contains very dim galaxies that until recently went unnoticed by astronomers. Possibly as numerous as conventional galaxies, these galaxies have the same general shape and even the same approximate number of stars as a common type of conventional galaxy, the spiral, but tend to be much larger. Because these galaxies' mass is spread out over larger areas, they have far fewer stars per unit volume than do conventional galaxies. Apparently these low-surface-brightness galaxies, as they are called, take much longer than conventional galaxies to condense their primordial gas and convert it to stars—that is, they evolve much more slowly.

    These galaxies may constitute an answer to the longstanding puzzle of the missing baryonic mass in the universe. Baryons—subatomic particles that are generally protons or neutrons—are the source of stellar, and therefore galactic, luminosity, and so their numbers can be estimated based on how luminous galaxies are. However, the amount of helium in the universe, as measured by spectroscopy, suggests that there are far more baryons in the universe than estimates based on galactic luminosity indicate. Astronomers have long speculated that the missing baryonic mass might eventually be discovered in intergalactic space or as some large population of galaxies that are difficult to detect.