THE LAWS OF COVERTURE
By: Vincent Bohnert
This legal doctrine, adopted by
England in the late 18th and 19th centuries, stated that
the wife’s legal rights were given to her husband upon marriage. This also includes when the wife gets paid
for her job (if she has one at all), the money goes legally to her husband
without the wife ever seeing it (if the husband so chooses). Another way to summarize what these laws
meant back then is when a man and woman became married they became “one person”
or “the entirety” meaning that they were the same person in the eyes of the
common law [1]. Transitioning from this,
women could not own property. So if the
husband died, the wife would not be able to keep the house no matter how long
she has lived in it “as one person” with her husband. In opposition, men were held liable for their
wife’s actions; if the wife violated the law, the husband was held accountable
under the laws of coverture [1].
Even
at this time, both participants had legal rights (when divorced) to their
marriage and what it contained/involved just like it does modernly [1]. If the husband and wife had a child when
married and then they got divorced, both the husband and the wife were expected
to support/raise their child together in a well thought out manner. However, most of other such laws belonged to
the ex-husband once the marriage was broken; these laws all could be found
under the term “consortium” [1].
Applications under this term included: material services, felicity
(happiness), and cooperation/sexual intercourse to name a few [1]. Many of these rights still exist today except
these rights are given to both the sexes now, as opposed to just the males
then.
Some other
interesting facts involving the laws of coverture is the topic of rape because
of what the law advocates. If the
husband catches the person in the process (or what he thinks is the process) of
raping his wife, he is legally eligible to kill that person in order to
maintain the “chastity” of the marriage [1].
Back
in the 18th and 19th centuries, women had little to no rights when not married so you can imagine why women would want to get married
because at least they had rights even though most of them, if not all of them
were retained by their husbands [2].
[1] The Newgate Prison Death Row
Education Society, "Women and the Law." Accessed February 16, 2014. http://www.umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/bonifield/rape2.html.
[2] Harvard Business School,
"Women, Enterprise, and Society." Last modified 2010. Accessed February
16, 2014. http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/collections/women_law/.
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