The Things That We Find In The Cupboard
Never take anything for granted
A random post on my Facebook timeline, which is more intended for information than for photos of my. pets, brought me to a stop yesterday. There was an article on a women’s history site about the history of the status of women on the concept of coveture. The story told in the article (https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should#.YrdlIyRnMwo.facebook) was that “Coverture is a long-standing legal practice that is part of our colonial heritage. Though Spanish and French versions of coverture existed in the new world, United States coverture is based in English law. Coverture held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s. The husband and wife became one–and that one was the husband. As a symbol of this subsuming of identity, women took the last names of their husbands. They were “feme coverts,” covered women. Because they did not legally exist, married women could not make contracts or be sued, so they could not own or work in businesses. Married women owned nothing, not even the clothes on their backs. They had no rights to their children, so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, she would not see her children again.”
Many of these things are familiar to many of us older females. I remember that at my first marriage in the late ‘60s, it didn’t occur to me or my husband at the time that I might keep my maiden name. It wasn’t really done. Only movie stars did things like that. I’ve been aware for some time that there were financial restrictions on women as well, many of which were only done away with in the ‘70s and ‘80s. But I never connected these things with some of the funny articles and posts about antiquated laws that were still on the books and that could be enforced if someone wanted to. (https://www.robertreeveslaw.com/blog/31-strange-bizarre-true-laws/)
Portrait of Abigail Adams by Benjamin Blyth/Library of Congress
Reading about this concept of coveture which is at the basis of many of the laws in countries that based their law on English common law was rather surprising, but the part about Abigail Adams’ letter to her husband John Adams when he was helping to write the original Constitution of the United States was extremely disconcerting. “Coverture was what Abigail Adams was talking about in her famous “Remember the Ladies” letter to John, written in the spring of 1776 as he and the Continental Congress were contemplating what an independent America would look like. Contrary to popular assumptions, she was not asking John for the vote or for what we would understand to be “equal rights.” Rather, when she advised: “Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could,” Abigail was talking about the absolute power husbands held in coverture. Abigail even obliquely referred to the shame of physical abuse when she proposed: “Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity (?)”
John’s reply dismissed her plea as a joke—he called it “saucy”—but in later correspondence with other lawmakers, he worried about the issue. If the American colonists had a right to rebel against their “virtual representation” in Parliament, why should women be virtually represented by men? But the issue was too thorny for the men of the time and so, even as they created a shiny new machine of government, with a Constitution and modern systems of law on both the federal and state levels, they allowed the creaky, pre-modern device of coverture to remain on the books.”
Yes, coveture is still on the books in the United States. As can be seen with some of the archaic laws, if they have not been properly removed, they are there. Now think about the retraction of Roe vs. Wade and all of the other laws that would restrict the rights of women that the GOP would like to adjust. The concept of coveture is the basis of those laws and Justice Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have both shown themselves to be in favor of precedents set at the time of the writing or before. Coveture is a lovely precedent for them but a terrible one for the females of the country. The GOP have spent at least the past 70 years preparing for a reset of the United States to a pre-Civil War society and I’m fairly certain that at least some of them have paid attention to many things that the rest of us who don’t equate change with reversal have not paid attention to. Books like Dark Money and Democracy In Chains have detailed the long term plans that now make sense to someone who has been around for long enough to watch them unfold. This little piece is important.
I have lived in Egypt for over 30 years now. When I first came here the family law was such that if a woman asked for a divorce, she was expected to give up everything, including her children. Divorce in Egypt in the early ‘80s was approached with extreme caution and many North American and European women were horrified at what we saw as the “backwardness” of Egyptian family law. Now it is 40 years later and we all stand in horror at what has been done in the Supreme Court of the United States. No one country has any sort of lock on the correct way to treat women until all of the remnants of coveture or guardianship have been removed from the law. Women do have the right to exist as free individuals.