PAGES OF OUR LIVES Women Became Aware
What do you know about coverture?
My guess is, not much, if anything at all.
In my last post I raised the question as to why we have been hearing so much, lately, about returning to the good old days when women were dominated by men (usually not described in exactly those words)!
Learning about coverture should provide some insight into what those calls to go back could really be all about— what is really going on!
So what exactly was coverture?
Coverture was the law of the land that made married women little more than the property of their husbands.
Coverture was the legal doctrine that treated a married woman’s possessions, wages, body, and children as property of her husband, available for him to use as he pleased.
Coverture gave husbands total control—from finances and place of residency to wife-beating and marital rape. A wife, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote during the Seneca Falls Convention, was “compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master.”
Coverture held that no female person had a legal identity.
[For] 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.
So, now might be a good time to take another look, with new eyes, at the Seneca Falls Convention, which was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and held in 1848 on July 19-20 in Seneca Falls, NY.
What were the actual goals of that Convention, which has been credited as the beginning of the first wave of the feminist movement in the United States?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave the opening speech, which contained the convention’s goals and purpose:
“We are assembled to protest against a form of government, existing without the consent of the governed—to declare our right to be free as man is free, to be represented in the government which we are taxed to support, to have such disgraceful laws as give man the power to chastise and imprison his wife, to take the wages which she earns, the property which she inherits, and, in case of separation, the children of her love.”
Over the course of two days, convention members discussed and ultimately adopted a “Declaration of Sentiments" which described the unjust and unequal treatment of women and presented resolutions demanding legal and cultural changes.
Click here to see the full document of the Declaration of Sentiments.
As the National Constitution Center currently describes it:
“The Declaration of Sentiments then had a long list of grievances, including the restrictions that coverture placed on married women."(1)
It is quite clear that with the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, what the early women's rights activists wanted was much more than suffrage.
What they wanted was emancipation for women—freedom from coverture.
The members of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 had addressed and exposed coverture, the deliberate system that existed over the position women had been placed in society.
This dystopian, Handmaid's Tale-type law of coverture was abolished in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries!
Historian Catherine Allgor has an excellent explanation of coverture, in her article “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should." (2)
In it, she also gives an example, from her own experience, of a vestige of the coverture law that still exists today.
Click here to read her article.
Allgor also sat for a filmed interview, in which she discusses and explains coverture.
She explains an experience that started her crusade to have coverture, become a word with which people are familiar.
In 2012, she was invited to speak at a historians’ teacher training institute to an audience of a dozen eminent scholars and about 50 of the best history teachers in the country. Coverture was part of her talk. She was dismayed that none of the teachers had ever heard the word. The eminent historians had, but they just didn’t think it was very important.
Click here to tune in to her interview.
In her article, Allgor also discusses—with a twist—the letter Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams in March 1776, imploring him to “Remember the Ladies.”
Allgor writes:
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.
Abigail Adams
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.
John’s reply dismissed her plea as a joke."
Click here to read the full text of Abigail’s letter.
There is another aspect of coverture that we must consider: its connection to the development of American slavery.
Both Catherine Allgor and Gerda Lerner describe the connection of the institutionalization of American slavery to coverture in similar ways.
In her book, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), Lerner explained that:
...the subordination of women by men provided the conceptual model for the creation of slavery as an institution….
Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group. (3)
Allgor, in the filmed interview, also explains how the United States had little difficulty creating and managing the institutionalization of slavery, precisely because they knew just how to do it.
They had a system already in place. It was the coverture law, by which they had been controlling women.
Before I (Anne Andersson) learned about coverture, I had been wondering just exactly what readied system could there have been that was so available for devaluing perfectly fine human beings so as to so easily enslave them.
Then I read about the coverture law over married women that had been in existence in the U.S. (and in other countries)—and I gained insight into the situation with women—and then better understood what has been going on.
“Koky” cartoon, approximately 1981
Back to Catherine Allgor:
Allgor concludes her article, and her interview, with this goal for herself:
Coverture is a term most Americans don’t know but it has been a goal of mine to ensure that all literate, well-educated Americans be as familiar with the idea of coverture as they are with other historical terms such as 'liberty', 'democracy, ' and 'equal rights.’
— Catherine Allgor, PhD, author, noted historian, visiting scholar with the Department of History at Tufts University.
Have you been wondering why most of us have never heard, nor learned, about coverture?
Some images to consider:
…To be continued
We plan an exploring two movements—the Women’s Movement and the Environmental Movement—as they exist, and are linked, in a patriarchal world.
We’ll do this with two posts a week for a few upcoming weeks.
Our Wishes:
We are hoping for a guest writer, or more, on the subjects of women and the Earth in a patriarchal world! Could this be you?
Do you have something to say that we might publish in a post?
Perhaps you have a new perspective?
Perhaps from a diverse culture?
Maybe: a short essay, a prayer, a poem, a drawing, a cartoon, a resource that you would like to suggest on these topics?
National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, PA, www.constitutioncenter.org.
Allgor, Catherine, “Coverture: the Word You Probably Don’t Know but Should,” National Women’s History Museum, September 4, 2014. www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should.
3. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford University Press, 1986
