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Yazell, "This rule [coverture] has worked out in reality to mean that though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband." [3] 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 ...
The Act altered the common law doctrine of coverture to include the wife's right to own, buy and sell her separate property. [8] Wives' legal identities were also restored, as the courts were forced to recognize a husband and a wife as two separate legal entities, in the same manner as if the wife was a feme sole. Married women's legal rights ...
In an exception to the statutory expansion of the legal rights of married women, the California Constitution of 1849, drawing on the community property tradition of Spanish civil law rather than the common law tradition, distinguished a wife's property from community property: "All property, both real and personal, of the wife, owned or claimed ...
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 ...
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.
The marital power derives from Germanic sources of the Roman-Dutch law, from which many features derive from (provincial) Roman law. In the earlier Roman law, a wife moved from the manus (guardianship) of her father to that of the father of her husband, an older brother of her husband or her husband; the "pater familias" or master of all persons and owner of all property in a familia.
Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage that probably began in the late 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder.
What survived as long as the 1960s were scattered quaint and picturesque legal remnants of coverture, scattered quaint but annoying legal remnants of coverture, and provisions whose main purpose was to prevent a wife from unilaterally dragging her husband into major financial transactions -- which he would be legally obligated to pay for ...