And they say that, in large part, because of this legal doctrine called coverture.
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Many historians have looked into this legal doctrine of coverture and seen it as all-encompassing.
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Until the late 19th century, under the doctrine of "coverture," US law treated married couples as one person -- him.
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Due to the practice of "coverture," which remained from British common law, married women's rights were controlled by their husbands.
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From these comments, it would be easy to conclude that DeVos was bringing back coverture and chattel laws to our campuses.
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Damningly, during the same era that Republicans are now praising, women immigrating into America were trapped in a patriarchal system known as coverture.
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And it ruled out most married women, who typically surrendered control of any property or income to their husbands, under a legal principle known as coverture.
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In the 1960s and '286.1s, marriage laws still contained some vestiges of coverture — the idea that once a woman got married, her entire legal identity was subsumed by her husband's.
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Men who groped you—particularly the ones who did it on a whim, out of aggressive boredom—would be shamed into the mausoleum, shoved into a corner next to coat hangers and coverture.
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Hendrik Hartog counter-criticized that coverture was only a legal fiction and not descriptive of social reality and that courts applying equity jurisdiction had developed many exceptions to coverture, but, according to Norma Basch, the exceptions themselves still required that the woman be dependent on someone and not all agreements between spouses to let wives control their property were enforceable in court. Publisher and activist, Myra Bradwell In 1869, coverture was criticized when Myra Bradwell was refused permission to practice as a lawyer in Illinois specifically because of coverture. In 1871, Bradwell argued to the Supreme Court that coverture violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment.
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The Universo HQ's coverture become the main source for the non-specialized press.
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According to Margot Canaday, "coverture's main purpose ... was the legal subordination of women." and see pp. 465 & 845 Canaday continued, "women's legal subordination through marriage ... was maintained in fact across [coverture]". According to Canaday, "coverture was diminished ... in the 1970s, as part of a broader feminist revolution in law that further weakened the principle that a husband owned a wife's labor (including her person).... The regime of coverture ... was coming undone [in the mid-20th century]". and see p.
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According to Arianne Chernock, coverture did not apply in Scotland, but whether it applied in Wales is unclear. After the rise of the women's rights movement in the mid-19th century, coverture came under increasing criticism as oppressive towards women, hindering them from exercising ordinary property rights and entering professions. Coverture was first substantially modified by late 19th century Married Women's Property Acts passed in various common-law legal jurisdictions, and was weakened and eventually eliminated by subsequent reforms. Certain aspects of coverture (mainly concerned with preventing a wife from unilaterally incurring major financial obligations for which her husband would be liable) survived as late as the 1960s in some states of the United States.
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Husbands also wielded power over their wives, being their rulers and custodians of their property. While it was once assumed that married women had little or no access to legal recourse, as a result of coverture, historians have more recently complicated our knowledge of coverture in the Middle Ages through various studies of married women's legal status across different courts and jurisdictions. Collectively, many of these studies have argued that 'there has been a tendency to overplay the extent to which coverture applied', as legal records reveal that married women could possess rights over property, could take part in business transactions, and interact with the courts. In medieval post-conquest Wales, it has been suggested that coverture only applied in certain situations.
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Coverture (sometimes spelled couverture) was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife's legal status of feme covert. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. Coverture arises from the legal fiction that a husband and wife are one person. Coverture was established in the common law of England for several centuries and throughout most of the 19th century, influencing some other common-law jurisdictions.
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" According to Chernock, "late Enlightenment radicals .... argued ... [that "coverture" and other "principles"] did not reflect the 'advancements' of a modern, civilized society. Rather, they were markers of past human errors and inconsistencies, and thus in need of further revision." Chernock claimed that "as the editor of Blackstone's Commentaries, [Edward] Christian used his popular thirteenth edition, published in 1800, to highlight the ways in which the practice of coverture might be modified." Chernock wrote that "Christian .... proceeded to recommend that a husband cease to be 'absolutely master of the profits of the wife's lands during the coverture.
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However, women were treated differently. After the Poor Law was passed, women and children received most of the aid. The law did not recognise single independent women, and put women and children into the same category. If a man was physically disabled, his wife was also treated as disabled under the coverture laws, even though coverture was fast becoming outmoded in the Edwardian era.
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Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace, To Marry An English Lord, pp. 166–67, Coverture never applied universally in Britain and was repealed in the 1800s. This effectively ended the concept of dowry as the property of a single woman was either retained by her after marriage or its income became marital property under joint control with a husband (not under his sole control as in coverture).
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Bailey notes that, while the common law doctrine of coverture was deeply limiting, '[t]hree other jurisdictions – equity, ecclesiastical law and customary law – gave women individual rights, redress and opportunities for litigation'.
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Canaday wrote, "the application of equal protection law to marital relations finally eviscerated the law of coverture", citing U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), Orr v. Orr (1979) & Kirchberg v. Feenstra (1981).
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As expressed in Hugo Black's dissent in United States v. Yazell, "This rule [coverture] has worked out in reality to mean that though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband." A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband's wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture, she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband.
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The doctrine of coverture carried over into British heraldry, in which there were established traditional methods of displaying the coat of arms of an unmarried woman, displaying the coat of arms of a widow, or displaying the combined coat of arms of a couple jointly, but no accepted method of displaying the coat of arms of a married woman separately as an individual. The practice by which a woman relinquishes her name and adopts her husband's name (e.g., "Mrs. John Smith") is similarly a representation of coverture, although usually symbolic rather than legal in form.
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Coverture (sometimes spelled couverture) was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights were subsumed by those of her husband. Coverture was enshrined in the common law of England and the United States throughout most of the 19th century. The idea was described in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in the late 18th century. Under traditional English common law an adult unmarried woman was considered to have the legal status of feme sole, while a married woman had the status of feme covert.
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The magazine focused on issues ranging from temperance and women's rights to dress reform and femme coverture. See also: In 1858 and 1859 Thomas was associate editor of the Mayflower with Lizzie Bunnel. Thomas also contributed articles to Woman's Journal, among other newspapers.
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Yazell, at p. 361 (Black, J., joined by William O. Douglas and Byron White, JJ.) (dissenting on decision regarding lower court's decision). a notion that Black "had supposed is ... completely discredited". Black described modern (as of 1966) coverture as an "archaic remnant of a primitive caste system".
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Women's Liberation as a Financial Innovation. Journal of Finance. As recently as 1972, two US states allowed a wife accused in criminal court to offer as a legal defense that she was obeying her husband's orders.The Law: Up from Coverture, in Time Magazine, March 20, 1972.
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When this Act was passed it was in a time when women had very few rights. Women were not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections;Combs, p. 1029 It could be argued that the act paved the way towards women's right to vote, since it extended female property rights. It sidelined one of the reasons women were denied the right: “Coverture was also used as a reason to deny women the vote and public office because of the assumption that a married woman would be represented by her husband. The end of coverture certainly ranks along with suffrage as the sine qua non [inception] of public recognition of women’s autonomy and personhood”.
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It takes place during presidency of Abraham Lincoln, who was president when the Homestead Act of 1862 became law. During the show it is noted that coverture was still in effect, so only single women could claim land under the Homestead Act, because married women lost most of their rights.
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Hearing of the Woman Suffrage Association, Before the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary . Retrieved on April 30, 2009. Stone argued that men should work to pass laws for equality in property rights between the sexes. Stone demanded an eradication of coverture, the folding of a wife's property into that of her husband.
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Edition of the Hardships in the collection of the Bodleian Library. Although Chapone's Hardships (1735) was published anonymously, it was an 'open secret' at the time—and recent scholarship has confirmed—that she was the author. The treatise discusses coverture and argues that the legal situation of English women at the time was comparable to slavery.
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These sorts of property were considered the separate property of a married woman under coverture. A husband could not sell, appropriate, or convey good title to his wife's assets considered paraphernalia without her separate consent. They did not become a part of her husband's estate upon his death, and could be conveyed by a married woman's will.See, e.g.
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In English law, baron and feme is a phrase used for :husband and :wife, in relation to each other, who were accounted as one person by coverture. Hence, by the old law of evidence, the one party was excluded from giving evidence for or against the other in civil questions, and a relic of this is still preserved in criminal law.
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The definition of rape has varied across time and cultures, often representing the social undercurrents of society. As women gained equal rights and the separation of church and state increased, what constituted rape slowly changed. Under the patriarchal doctrine of coverture, women were "legally considered the chattel of her husband, his possession."Relegating women to the position of object or property was ingrained in most cultures.
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A few years after marrying James Bradwell, Myra Bradwell started her formal law training when her husband was accepted to the Illinois Bar. She apprenticed as a lawyer in her husband's office and assisted him with research and legal writings. Complications arose because of coverture laws, which prohibited married women from holding property. The ability to hold property was necessary to become even a notary public.
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John Neal is remembered as America’s first women’s rights lecturer. Starting in 1823 and continuing at least as late as 1869, he used magazine articles, short stories, novels, public speaking, political organizing, and personal relationships to advance feminist issues in the Unites States and England, reaching the height of his influence in this field circa 1843. He declared intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education for women. He also used his writing to explore the performative nature of gender. Through their association while in London, Neal claimed to have convinced both John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham to take up women’s rights issues as well. Aside from this early attack on coverture in 1823, Neal’s early feminist positions were primarily influenced by the written works of Mary Wollstonecraft, particularly A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
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The Hardships is an argument against coverture and other forms of oppression. Chapone canvasses both English law and foreign equivalents, arguing that English law in the mid-18th century put women in a less favourable position than either Roman or Portuguese law. Her discussion of Portuguese law, which, at the time, was relatively progressive with regard to women's rights, was unusual. Generally speaking, non-Lusophone works did not consider Portuguese sources.
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Benzenberg (1954). The abolition of coverture has been seen as "one of the greatest extensions of property rights in human history", and one that led to a number of positive financial and economic impacts. Specifically, it led to shifts in household portfolios, a positive shock to the supply of credit, and a reallocation of labor towards non-agriculture and capital intensive industries.Hazan, Moshe; Weiss, David and Zoabi, Hosny (Oct 29, 2018).
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During the Middle Ages, the status and rights of women varied between different parts of the country, as the local county laws applied different laws in different counties. The first attempt of a national law was Magnus Erikssons landslag from 1350, which established one law for the country side, and one Stadslagen (City Law) for the city, a system which was kept by the Kristofers landslag from 1442.Nationalencyklopedin (NE) From 1350 onward, the civil status of women were generally the same in both the county law and the city law: an unmarried woman was under the coverture of her closest male relative, and a wife under the coverture of her husband, while a widow was of legal majority. In 1608, the law texts of the Old Testament from the bible were introduced in the law by amendments,Granström, Görel, Kvinnorna och rätten: från stormaktstid till rösträttsstrid, Hallgren & Fallgren, Uppsala, 1996 which at least formally significantly worsened women's status.
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In 1859, the first women's magazine in Sweden and the Nordic countries, the Tidskrift för hemmet, was founded by Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona. This has been referred to as the starting point of a women's movement in Sweden. The organized women's movement begun in 1873, when the Married Woman's Property Rights Association was co-founded by Anna Hierta- Retzius and Ellen Anckarsvärd. The prime task of the organization was to fully abolish coverture.
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Under the common law legal doctrine known as coverture, a married woman in British North American colonies and later in the United States had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. Her rights and obligations were subsumed under his. She could not own property, enter into contracts, or earn a salary.Mary Beth Norton, "'Either Married or to be Married': Women's Legal Equality in Early America," in Carla Gardina Pestana and Sharon V. Salinger, eds.
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In certain cases, a wife did not have individual legal liability for her misdeeds since it was legally assumed that she was acting under the orders of her husband, and generally a husband and a wife were not allowed to testify either for or against each other. A queen of England, whether she was a queen consort or a queen regnant, was generally exempted from the legal requirements of coverture, as understood by Blackstone.
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This situation continued until the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when married women's property acts started to be passed in many English-speaking jurisdictions, setting the stage for further reforms. In the United States, many states passed Married Women's Property ActsMarried Women's Property Acts (United States [1839]), in Britannica Online Encyclopedia. to eliminate or reduce the effects of coverture. Nineteenth- century courts in the United States also enforced state privy examination laws.
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The organized women's movement begun in 1873, when Married Woman's Property Rights Association was co-founded by Anna Hierta-Retzius and Ellen Anckarsvärd. The prime task of the organization was to abolish coverture. In 1884, Fredrika Bremer Association was founded by Sophie Adlersparre to work for the improvement in women's rights. The second half of the 19th century saw the creation of several women's rights organisations and a considerable activity within both active organization as well as intellectual debate.
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Scholars dispute whether Chapone was a bluestocking—an 18th-century term for an educated woman who belonged to tight-knit intellectual circles. One difference between Chapone and most bluestockings was her social status: unlike Elizabeth Montagu and Mary Delany, she did not come from wealth or nobility. Orr points out that Chapone, unlike most bluestockings, was particularly focussed on the law—bluestockings, while they were advocates for education and literary work by women, did not generally critique coverture.
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In the early 1660s Katherine bought two major London properties owned by Lady Jane Aungier. She was, at least once, tempted by remarriage, but rejected the prospect in part because it would infringe on her economic activities in behalf of her children. Under the doctrine of coverture she retained her widow's status as an independent legal entity if she did not remarry. Although she did not marry she had a suitor, the Scottish doctor Alexander Callendar.
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These perfect duties will thus create liberty and collective freedom within a state. He uses, On Liberty to discuss gender equality in a society. To Mill, Utilitarianism was the perfect tool to justify gender equality in The Subjection of Women, referring to the political, lawful and social subjection of women. When a woman was married, she entered a legally binding coverture with her husband; once she married her legal existence as an individual was suspended under "marital unity" .
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Legal reforms to family laws have taken place in many countries during the past few decades. These dealt primarily with gender equality within marriage and with divorce laws. Women have been given equal rights in marriage in many countries, reversing older family laws based on the dominant legal role of the husband. Coverture, which was enshrined in the common law of England and the US for several centuries and throughout most of the 19th century, was abolished.
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Abigail Adams, wife of President John Adams "Housewife" (called a "Goodwife" in New England) refers to the married women's economic and cultural roles. Under legal rules of "coverture," a wife had no separate legal identity; everything she did was under her authority of her husband. He controlled all the money, including any dowry or inheritance she might have brought to the marriage. She had certain legal rights to a share of the family property when the husband died.
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But the poll tax and other voting-related restrictions were mainly used to prevent African Americans from voting, circumventing the explicit prohibition on doing this in the Fifteenth Amendment. Laws in various jurisdictions gave different property rights to women and non-white people from the country's founding, including allowing people to be owned as slaves until the Thirteenth Amendment, inability of married women to own property until common-law coverture was abolished (mostly in the 1800s).
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18 February 2016. Retrieved 20 February 2016. This act was the only US statute to ever to use the term "natural born citizen", found in the US Constitution in relation to the prerequisites for a person to serve as President or Vice-President, and the term was removed by the Naturalization Act of 1795. Though the Act did not specifically preclude women from citizenship, the common law practice of coverture had been absorbed into the legal system of the United States.
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Under male dominated family law, women had few, if any, rights, being under the control of the husband or male relatives. Legal concepts that existed throughout the centuries, such as coverture, marital power, Head and Master laws, kept women under the strict control of their husbands. Restrictions from marriage laws also extended to public life, such as marriage bars. Practices such as dowry or bride price were, and still are to this day in some parts of the world, very common.
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In its third generation Sir William Portman, 6th Baronet died in 1690 without progeny, the bulk of estates passed to a husband of the family: Henry Seymour (d.1728), MP, 5th son of Sir Edward Seymour, 3rd Baronet of Berry Pomeroy, Devon (by coverture applying to his wife Anne Portman, second daughter of Sir John Portman, 1st Baronet). Seymour took the surname Portman in lieu of his patronymic, but left no issue. The property then devolved to another cousin, William Berkeley (d.
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A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband's wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband. This situation persisted until the mid-to-late 19th century, when married women's property acts started to be passed in many English-speaking legal jurisdictions, setting the stage for further reforms.
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The status of married women at that time was defined by the doctrine of coverture, by which wives were placed under the protection and control of their husbands.Ginzberg, p. 17 In the words of William Blackstone's authoritative Commentaries, "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage."Quoted in Wellman, p. 136 The husband of a married woman became the owner of any property she brought into a marriage.
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Finally, an unmarried woman could be liberated from guardianship by a petition to the monarch. Upon the day of her marriage, she was placed under the coverture of her husband. However, men was banned from selling the property of their wife without her consent, wives were given the right to sell property and handle affairs in the absence of her husband, and both spouses regardless of gender were secured the right to divorce upon adultery, upon which the innocent party was secured custody of the children.
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" While direct decision-making in political, economic and educational matters were not openly afforded women in fora such as the Constitutional Convention, in the Quaker Meeting women held position equal to men in keeping with the Quaker view that "in souls there is no sex" and in the colonial era in the Delaware Valley region, heavily populated with Quakers and others holding similar views, women held more influence than in other parts of the colonies, including voting rights (although these often included property ownership requirements, and the Coverture laws could sometimes prevent married women from meeting such requirements).See also Women's suffrage in the United States ("New Jersey in 1776 placed only one restriction on the general suffrage, which was the possession of at least £50 (about $7,800 adjusted for inflation) in cash or property, with the election laws referring to the voters as "he or she."). Women also often worked in the marketplace and were quite inventive, as the truth and the legend of Betsy Ross indicates, although for married women, the Coverture laws again sometimes meant their recognition and compensation in the marketplace varied. In the culture of the Delaware Valley, men took roles as nurturing fathers.
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The two foremost questions was to abolish coverture for unmarried women, and for the state to provide women an equivalent to a university. Both questions were met: in 1858, a reform granted unmarried women the right to apply for legal majority by a simple procedure, and in 1861, Högre lärarinneseminariet was founded as a "Women's University". In 1859, the first women's magazine in Sweden and the Nordic countries, the Tidskrift för hemmet, was founded by Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona. This has been referred to as the starting point of a women's movement in Sweden.
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During the 19th century some women, such as Ernestine Rose, Paulina Wright Davis, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in the United States and Britain began to challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands gained control of their wives' real estate and wages. Beginning in the 1840s, state legislatures in the United States and the British Parliament began passing statutes that protected women's property from their husbands and their husbands' creditors. These laws were known as the Married Women's Property Acts.
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Portrait of an English married couple, circa 1780. The system of feme sole and feme covert developed in England in the High and Late Middle Ages as part of the common law system, which had its origins in the legal reforms of Henry II and other medieval English kings. Medieval legal treatises, such as that famously known as Bracton, described the nature of coverture and its impact on married women's legal actions. Bracton states that husband and wife were a single person, being one flesh and one blood, a principle known as 'unity of person'.
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The publication discussed the common law concept of coverture in lay terms, explaining a husband's lawful authority to sell any of his wife's possessions, remove children from her care or restrain her movement to the home. She concluded for her audiences that only legislation would provide legal protections to women. In addition to the law and suffrage, Ahrens was active in social services. In 1890, she became the founding president of the Chicago Immediate Aid Society, which opened a relief station offering meals and lodging to homeless men as well as helping them find work.
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The practice was developed in the mid-18th century and was tied to the idea of coverture, the idea that "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage."Henry Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, quoted in There is a tendency among scientists to refer to women by their first and last name and to men by their surname only. This may result in female scientists being perceived as less eminent than their male colleagues.
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Hajjar, Lisa, "Religion, state power, and domestic violence in Muslim societies: A framework for comparative analysis." Law & Social Inquiry 29.1 (2004); pp 1–38 In Islam, there is no coverture, an idea central in European, American as well as in non-Islamic Asian common law, and the legal basis for the principle of marital property. An Islamic marriage is a contract between a man and a woman. A Muslim man and woman do not merge their legal identity upon marriage, and do not have rights over any shared marital property.
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Most states in the United States follow the common law which permits name changing for non-fraudulent purposes. This is actually the most common method, since most women who marry do not petition a court under the statutorily prescribed method, but simply use a new name (typically the husband's, a custom which started under the theory of coverture where a woman lost her identity and most rights when she married).In re Natale, 527 S.W.2d 402 (Mo. App. 1975); In re Kruzel, 226 N.W.2d 458 (Wis. 1975).
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The rights and duties of the spouses derived from this principle. Thus, a man could not donate any piece of property, nor enter into any agreement with her, as her separate legal existence would be required for such deeds. On the other hand, he could bequeath property to his wife by will, since his wife's "coverture" would cease with his death. A woman who had been wronged—either herself or through her property—could not sue whoever had wronged her without the agreement and legal involvement of her husband.
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Photograph of American women replacing men fighting in Europe, 1945 Feminists continued to campaign for the reform of family laws which gave husbands control over their wives. Although by the 20th century coverture had been abolished in the UK and US, in many continental European countries married women still had very few rights. For instance, in France, married women did not receive the right to work without their husband's permission until 1965. Feminists have also worked to abolish the "marital exemption" in rape laws which precluded the prosecution of husbands for the rape of their wives.
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2, C-F) dictionary (1944) (in Swedish) This was arguably the first time women organized themselves to deal with a wider women's issue in Sweden. In 1856, Fredrika Bremer published the novel Hertha, which aroused great controversy and created the "Hertha Debate". The two foremost questions were the abolition of coverture for unmarried women, and for the state to provide women an equivalent to a university. Social change arrived: in 1858, a reform granted unmarried women the right to apply for legal majority by a simple procedure, and in 1861, Högre lärarinneseminariet was founded as a "Women's University".
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In civil law jurisdictions, marital power (, , ) was a doctrine in terms of which a wife was legally an incapax under the usufructory tutorship (tutela usufructuaria) of her husband. The marital power included the power of the husband to administer both his wife's separate property and their community property. A wife was not able to leave a will, enter into a contract, or sue or be sued, in her own name or without the permission of her husband. It is very similar to the doctrine of coverture in the English common law, as well as to the Head and Master law property laws.
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Kerber, pp. 22–23. As attorney general he defended the state in a Loyalist recovery action involving the rights of married women (who at the time had few rights under the common law doctrine of coverture), arguing that Loyalist William Martin's wife had in her own right abandoned the property in question.Kerber, pp. 25–28. Harrison Gray Otis, portrait by Gilbert Stuart Sullivan supported harsh laws confiscating the property of Loyalists who fled the country or fought with the British, although he later took on as clients personal friends who were Loyalists seeking to recover their property.
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New York: Random House. Laws that sharply restricted the independent activity of married women also created barriers to the campaign for women's suffrage. According to William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, an authoritative commentary on the English common law on which the American legal system is modeled, "by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage",Quoted in Gordon (2000), p. 41 referring to the legal doctrine of coverture that was introduced to England by the Normans in the Middle Ages.
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Women's rights to a public identity were restricted by the common law practice of coverture. As women were not citizens in their own right and married women were required to assume the citizenship and residency requirements of their spouses, many women upon marriage had no voting rights. The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted any free white, who met character and residency policies, the right to become a citizen and the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to those born in the United States, including African- Americans. Rulings by the Supreme Court allowed racial limitations to naturalization of people who were neither black nor white.
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Divorce law in the U.S. was based on English Common Law, which developed at a time when a female gave up her personal property rights on marriage (see Coverture). Upon separation from marriage, the husband retained the right to the wife's property, but, in exchange, had an ongoing responsibility to support the wife after dissolution of the marriage. British law was amended by legislation including Married Women's Property Act 1870 and Married Women's Property Act 1882 which reformed females' property rights relating to marriage, by, for example, permitting divorced females to regain the property they owned before marriage.
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It was the first of 90 books and pamphlets she wrote. That May she petitioned the senate of the University of Cambridge to provide examinations for women; the Cambridge Higher Examination for women was introduced the following year. Jordan notes that "much of the credit for this should go to Anne Clough, but ... Butler played a very influential part ... of the campaign." At the time British law relating to marriage was based on the legal doctrine of coverture, in which a woman's legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband upon their matrimony.
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Clarissa Wren proceeded to hire local law partners Elihu N. Powell, who also later became a judge of the state 16th Circuit, and William F. Bryan; and law partners Stephen T. Logan and future U.S. president Abraham Lincoln from Springfield. Aquilla Wren was granted a decree after a finding by a jury that his wife Clarissa had been guilty of misconduct. During the course of the case, Clarissa Wren married Amaziah Hart in Peoria. Because of the doctrine of coverture, in which the wife's legal personality was subsumed into that of her husband, Amaziah Hart became a party to the case.
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In the past, a woman in England would usually assume her new husband's family name (or surname) after marriage; often she was compelled to do so under coverture laws. Assuming the husband's surname remains common practice today in the United Kingdom (although there is no law that states the name must be changed) and in other countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Gibraltar, Falkland Islands, Ireland, India, Philippines, the English-speaking provinces of Canada and the United States. In some communities in India, spouses and children take the father's first name or proper name. Often there are interesting variations of name adoption, including family name adoption.
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Married women were responsible for their own actions in criminal presentments and defamation, but their husbands represented them in litigation for abduction and in interpersonal pleas. The extent of coverture in medieval England has also been qualified by the existence of femme sole customs that existed in some medieval English towns. This granted them independent commercial and legal rights as if they were single. This practice is outlined in Darcy's London custumal of the 1340s, allowing married women working independently of their husband to act as a single woman in all matters concerning her craft, such as renting a shop and suing and being sued for debt.
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In New England in 1716, Joan Jackson became the first slave woman to win her freedom in a New England court. Elizabeth Freeman brought the first legal test of the constitutionality of slavery in Massachusetts after the American Revolution, asserting that the state's new constitution and its assertions of men's equality under the law meant that slavery could not exist. As a landowner and taxpayer, she is considered to be one of the most famous black women of the revolutionary era. Coverture limited the ability of some free black women to file lawsuits on their own, but a few women still filed jointly with their husbands.
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Under the doctrine of two spheres, women were to exist in the "domestic sphere" at home while their husbands operated in the "public sphere" of politics and business. Women took on the new role of "softening" their husbands and instructing their children in piety and not republican values, while men handled the business and financial affairs of the family. Some doctors of this period even went so far as to suggest that women should not get an education, lest they divert blood away from the uterus to the brain and produce weak children. The coverture laws ensured that men would hold political power over their wives.
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The most famous example of this English female inheritance and agency right is perhaps Elizabeth I of England, who held all rights a male monarch did. While single women held rights to hold property equivalent to those of men, marriage and married women were affected by the Norman Conquest changes to the law in the 12th Century. Coverture was introduced to the common law in some jurisdictions, requiring property of a wife to be held in the husband's name, custody and control. The Normans also introduced the dowry in England replacing the earlier custom of the new husband giving a morning gift to his bride.
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James Martin was the son of William Martin and Anna Gordon Martin, Loyalists who had fled Massachusetts during the political turmoil of the American Revolution. Anna Gordon Martin had brought significant amounts of real estate into her marriage; through a complicated set of legal arrangements, her husband William had only a life interest in the property. Because the Martins, like other Loyalists, had fled Massachusetts, the post-revolutionary government of Massachusetts had confiscated Anna Gordon Martin's land as state property. James Martin, as the couple's adult son, argued that his mother had been required to choose between following her husband (as the marital law of coverture required) or staying in Massachusetts (and keeping her land).
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The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives: With an Explanation of the Original Curse of Subjection Passed upon the Woman: In an Humble Address to the Legislature (1735) is a legal treatise by Sarah Chapone on the oppression of married women, styled as an address to Parliament. It was originally published anonymously, but scholarship has confirmed that Chapone was the author. The Hardships, which was written at a time of political crisis in England, argues that the position of married women under the legal doctrine of coverture was analogous to slavery. Present-day scholars have noted philosophical analogies with republican theory and currents of Christian feminism in the work.
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A married woman was not allowed to manage her own inheritances, but the usual (largely nominal) rules about asking her permission applied. Marriage contracts could not be used to overcome the Custom's doctrines of male marital power and the coverture of married women. The best that an egalitarian-minded couple could do was to stipulate in their marriage contract that the wife would have the right of administration over her own goods (benefit from their returns), but then, she did not have the right to alienate those goods freely and unilaterally. The essential point of the option was to protect the woman's fortune from the possible incompetence or malfeasance of her future husband.
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In 1869, Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois bar exam and applied for admission to the Illinois bar in accordance with a state statute that permitted any adult of good character and with sufficient training to be admitted to the practice of law. Because she was a woman, however, the Illinois Supreme Court denied her admission, noting that the "strife" of the bar would surely destroy femininity. The legal rationale was based on the common law doctrine of coverture which denied a married woman a legal existence apart from her husband. Bradwell appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that her right to practice law was protected by the Privileges or Immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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In some cultures, particularly in the Anglophone West, wives often change their surnames to that of the husband upon getting married. For some, this is a controversial practice, due to its tie to the historical doctrine of coverture and to the historically subordinated roles of wives. Others argue that today this is merely a harmless tradition that should be accepted as a free choice. Some jurisdictions consider this practice as discriminatory and contrary to women's rights, and have restricted or banned it; for example, since 1983, when Greece adopted a new marriage law which guaranteed gender equality between the spouses, women in Greece are required to keep their birth names for their whole life.
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The scandal was the trial of Daniel McFarland, a man who was convicted of murdering his ex-wife Abigail's fiancé, Albert Richardson, who had been a popular writer for Horace Greeley's Tribune. In writing about the trial, Stanton was determined to break through the "hypocrisy that prevented frank discussion of marriage by bringing the steamy facts of desire, jealousy, and extramarital sex uncomfortably close in a way that oblique discussions about coverture could not." The judge would not recognize Abigail's divorce and therefore prevented her from testifying against her husband, who was eventually acquitted on grounds of insanity. After the verdict, Stanton appealed for change—namely, for divorce laws to be altered and improved.
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Steel v Houghton (1788) 1 H Bl 51; 126 ER 32The full case name is "Steel against Houghton et Uxor" ("Steel against Houghton and wife"). Since at that time a married woman's rights and duties were subsumed in those of her husband, under the doctrine of coverture, Mary Houghton could only be sued through her husband. is a landmark judgment in English law by the House of Lords that is considered to mark the modern legal understanding of private property rights. Ostensibly the matter found that no person has a right at common law to glean the harvest of a private field, but the judgment has been taken to be a more general precedent for private land matters.
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George Richmond Josephine Elizabeth Butler (' Grey; 13 April 1828 – 30 December 1906) was an English feminist and social reformer in the Victorian era. She campaigned for women's suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture in British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution. Grey grew up in a well-to-do and politically connected progressive family which helped develop in her a strong social conscience and firmly held religious ideals. She married George Butler, an Anglican divine and schoolmaster, and the couple had four children, the last of whom, Eva, died falling from a banister.
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The Married Women's Property Acts are laws enacted by the individual states of the United States beginning in 1839, usually under that name and sometimes, especially when extending the provisions of a Married Women's Property Act, under names describing a specific provision, such as the Married Women's Earnings Act. The Married Women's Property Acts helped to rectify some of the difficulties that women faced under coverture, the English common law system that subsumed married women's ability to own property, wages, enter in to contracts, and otherwise act autonomously to their husband's authority. After New York passed their Married Women's Property Law in 1848, this law became the template for other states to grant married women the right to own property.
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Walker p 63 The state had argued that, "[t]he traditional view of marriage—between a man and woman...—has been recognized for millennia." Crabb stated, "the most 'traditional' form of marriage has not been between one man and one woman, but between one man and multiple women, which presumably is not a tradition that defendants and amici would like to continue...Similarly, women were deprived of many opportunities, including the right to vote, for much of this country's history, often because of 'traditional' beliefs about women's abilities...With respect to marriage in particular, there was a time when 'the very being or legal existence of [a] woman [was] suspended' when she married,"Wolf v. Walker p 66-68 referring to coverture.
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He was asked on the spot to address a crowd in Portland, Maine on the subject of freedom on Independence Day 1832. Neal accepted and gave an unprepared speech using the subjects of freedom and American independence from England to attack contemporary institutions as affronts to freedom: enslavement of Black Americans, denial of women’s rights to property ownership under coverture, and denial of women’s suffrage as taxation without representation - the foundation of American independence from England. Women’s rights became a favorite topic of his frequent lecture engagements between 1832 and 1843 throughout the northeastern states. Because they were almost always published afterward and often covered in newspaper reviews, these events broadened Neal’s sphere of influence and made his ideas more accessible to readers not necessarily aligned with his views.
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In some cultures, particularly in the Anglophone West, wives often change their surnames to that of their husbands upon getting married. Although this procedure is today optional, for some it remains a controversial practice due to its tie to the historical doctrine of coverture or to other similar doctrines in civil law systems, and to the historically subordinated roles of wives; while others argue that today this is merely a harmless tradition that should be accepted as a free choice. Some jurisdictions consider this practice as discriminatory and contrary to women's rights, and have restricted or banned it; for example, since 1983, when Greece adopted a new marriage law which guaranteed gender equality between the spouses, women in Greece are required to keep their birth names for their whole life.
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Cowan was especially concerned that the law would allow women the right to enter into contracts independently of their husbands. The debates over the Civil Rights Act included guaranteeing, at the federal level, the right for any free person to enter into a contract, and he argued that the federal government was not to involve itself in regulating contract law, which he saw as squarely within the domain of state power. In particular, he argued that the federal guarantee of contract rights might allow women to enter into contracts under their own person and not in the person of and with consent of their husbands. Woman's ability to enter into contracts was illegal due to coverture law, which were the set of laws referred to as the "civil death" of women.
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Until the passing of the Marriage Act of 1753, a formal ceremony of marriage before a clergyman was not a legal requirement in England, and marriages were unregistered. All that was required was for both parties to agree to the union, so long as each had reached the legal age of consent, which was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Women were completely subordinated to their husbands after marriage, the husband and wife becoming one legal entity, a legal status known as coverture. As the eminent English judge Sir William Blackstone wrote in 1753: "the very being, or legal existence of the woman, is suspended during the marriage, or at least is consolidated and incorporated into that of her husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything".
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He has been the subject of controversy over time due to an alleged statement he made that "a husband could thrash his wife with impunity provided that he used a stick no bigger than his thumb". This claim was widely circulated and led to Buller being caricatured as "Judge Thumb" by James Gillray in 1782. Under the system of coverture marriage, a couple became one legal person, over which the husband had rights and responsibility; accordingly, crimes by him against her were not recognised except in the most extreme cases. If Buller did indeed make the ruling, it was merely a refinement of earlier precedent, as for example the death of a wife by beating with a pestle had been ruled as murder, but only after consideration that "though a husband by law may correct, the pestle was no instrument for correction".
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Under traditional English common law, an adult unmarried woman was considered to have the legal status of feme sole, while a married woman had the status of feme covert. These terms are English spellings of medieval Anglo-Norman phrases (the modern standard French spellings would be femme seule "single woman" and femme couverte, literally "covered woman"). The principle of coverture was described in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England in the late 18th century: A feme sole had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name, while a feme covert was not recognized as having legal rights and obligations distinct from those of her husband in most respects. Instead, through marriage a woman's existence was incorporated into that of her husband, so that she had very few recognized individual rights of her own.
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62 A long and energetic campaign by different women's groups and some men led to the passing of this Act. The Married Women's Property Act of 1870 provided that wages and property which a wife earned through her own work or inherited would be regarded as her separate property and, by the Married Women's Property Act 1882, this principle was extended to all property, regardless of its source or the time of its acquisition.Marriage, Wife Beating and the Law in Victorian England p 101 The Act also protected a woman not only from her husband gaining control of her property but also from people that worked for him, his creditor: “These acts generally exempted married women’s property from attachments by creditors of their husbands”. This gave married women a separate statutory estate, and released them from coverture.
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In 1790, the law was revised to specifically include women, but in 1807 the law was again revised to exclude them, an unconstitutional act since the state constitution specifically made any such change dependent on the general suffrage. See Women's suffrage in the United States. Through the doctrine of coverture, many states also denied married women the right to own property in their own name, although most allowed single women (widowed, divorced or never married) the "Person" status of men, sometimes pursuant to the common law concept of a femme sole. Over the years, a variety of claimants sought to assert that discrimination against women in voting, in property ownership, in occupational license, and other matters was unconstitutional given the Constitution's use of the term "Person", but the all-male courts did not give this fair hearing.
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Her son was raised there for the first few years of his life, looked after by domestic staff because of Eddy's poor health. The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy alleges that she allowed him to be adopted when he was four. According to Eddy, she was unable to prevent the adoption. Women in the United States at the time could not be their own children's guardians, per the legal doctrine of coverture. Her next two marriages, lifelong poor health, and the numerous legal actions in which she was involved, are examined in detail—including lawsuits she initiated against her students; a criminal case in which her third husband was accused of conspiring to murder one of them (an allegation never proven); her belief that her former students killed her third husband by using "mental malpractice"; and her legal adoption of a 41-year-old homeopath when she was 67.
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Family Law: A Very Short Introduction. . p. 35. The view that a husband cannot be charged with the rape of his wife was described by Sir Matthew Hale (1609–1676) in History of the Pleas of the Crown, published posthumously in 1736, where he wrote that "The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract". Also, American and English law subscribed until the 20th century to the system of coverture, that is, a legal doctrine under which, upon marriage, a woman's legal rights were subsumed by those of her husband. The implication was that once unified by marriage, a spouse could no longer be charged with raping one's spouse, anymore than be charged with raping oneself.
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The style and format of the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" was that of the "Declaration of Independence;" for example the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" stated, "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights." The Declaration further stated, "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man towards woman." The declaration went on to specify female grievances in regard to the laws denying married women ownership of wages, money, and property (all of which they were required to turn over to their husbands; laws requiring this, in effect throughout America, were called coverture laws), women's lack of access to education and professional careers, and the lowly status accorded women in most churches. Furthermore, the Declaration declared that women should have the right to vote.
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Over the 1820s Neal shifted his focus from educational intellectual ideas to political and economic issues like coverture and suffrage. John Neal’s first public speaking experience was before a Baltimore debating society as a young lawyer in 1823. The topic of the debate was slavery, and though Neal was "resolutely and heartily opposed to slavery," he stood to voice an argument ostensibly in support of slavery that interwove the issue with the legal rights of women: > How long [women] shall be rendered by law incapable of acquiring, holding, > or transmitting property, except under special conditions, like the slave? > Take the best and most comprehensive definition of slavery...and you will be > satisfied that one-half of your whole population...are born to slavery, that > they live in slavery, and are dying in slavery. His limited presence on an 1823 Baltimore debate stage aside, Neal’s first true lecture to include feminist issues was an Independence Day address in Portland, Maine in 1832.
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The fact that many of the Framers of the Constitution were "illegitimate fathers" and conceived children they did not acknowledge or recognize may have affected the ambiguity around the status of children and children's rights in drafting and ratifying the Constitution. Also, there were differing views of family structure among the framers themselves and the cultures and political economies they represented. Sociologist Michael Kimmel has said that the conventions of the time for masculinity would suggest that some of the Framers doted on their children conceived legitimately. Also, some of the Framers, such as Thomas Mifflin, George Clymer, John Dickinson, and Benjamin Franklin came from Quaker traditions, or Quaker-populated regions, in which the family was regarded as a somewhat child-centered institution, nurturing behavior in fathers was encouraged, supported and even required, women were expect to take economic responsibility for themselves, and men and women were seen as separate people in marriage (sometimes in civil disobedience of the laws of coverture).
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In the 20th century, the role of the wife in Western marriage changed in two major ways; the first was the breakthrough from an "institution to companionate marriage";"Companionship marriage" and "companionate marriage" are synonyms (the latter being the older one), although the term usually refers to a relationship based on equality, it might instead refer to a marriage with mutual interest in their children, for the first time since the Middle Ages, wives became distinct legal entities, and were allowed their own property and allowed to sue. Until then, partners were a single legal entity, but only a husband was allowed to exercise this right, called coverture. The second change was the drastic alteration of middle and upper-class family life, when in the 1960s these wives began to work outside their home, and with the social acceptance of divorces the single-parent family, and stepfamily or "blended family" as a more "individualized marriage". Today, some women may wear a wedding ring in order to show her status as a wife.
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For example, although women had been voting in some states, such as New Jersey, since the founding of the United States, and prior to that in the colonial era, other states denied them the vote. In 1756 Lydia Chapin Taft voted, casting a vote in the local town hall meeting in place of her deceased husband. In 1777 women lost the right to exercise their vote in New York, in 1780 women lost the right to exercise their vote in Massachusetts, and in 1784 women lost the right to exercise their vote in New Hampshire. From 1775 until 1807, the state constitution in New Jersey permitted all persons worth over fifty pounds (about $7,800 adjusted for inflation, with the election laws referring to the voters as "he or she") to vote; provided they had this property, free black men and single women regardless of race therefore had the vote until 1807, but not married women, who could have no independent claim to ownership of fifty pounds (anything they owned or earned belonged to their husbands by the Common law of Coverture).
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Performed in 1911 in the Kingsway Theatre, In the Workhouse was one of the most controversial plays produced by Edy Craig's Pioneer Players as part of a triple bill with Chris St. John's The First Actress and Cicely Hamilton's Jack and Jill and A Friend (King's Hall, 1911). It is an exposé of the iniquities of the Coverture Act, which decreed that a married woman had no separate legal existence from her husband and therefore meant that if her husband entered - or left - the workhouse, she and her children were obliged to go with him. Set in a workhouse ward, where a group of mothers, married and unmarried, look after their children, it exposes the contradictions of a system where Penelope, a respectable, secure, mother of five and unmarried is freer than respectable Mrs Cleaver who returns from her appeal to the Board of Guardians to announce that legally she has no right to leave the workhouse, eve though she has work to go to and a home available for herself and her children. The play, with its refusal to condemn vice and the unmarried mother, was either condemned for offensiveness or acclaimed for its importance.
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