Marriage, Society and English Common Law
Marriage is a social and financial institution. The “standard formula” for a successful marriage consists of social status, property and financial status.1 Matrimonial law originally reflected the gender roles of men and women of the time in which those laws were in place.2 Women in early America were placed underneath English Common Law and Coverture. Coverture was a principle of English Common Law “by which women husband and wife are regarded as one person, and her legal authority in a degree lost or suspended, during the continuance of the matrimonial union”.3 Women placed under coverture had “no legal existence separate from her husband, who was regarded as her head representative in the social state”.4 The shift in the conceptions of what marriage “should” look like is mirrored in the shifts in family and matrimonial law.
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Lebsock, Suzanne. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1874-1860. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1990. ↩
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Grossman, Joanna L., and Lawrence Meir Friedman. Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in 20th Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.↩
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Grossman, Joanna L., and Lawrence Meir Friedman. Inside the Castle↩
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Grossman, Joanna L., and Lawrence Meir Friedman. Inside the Castle↩