Coverture

Coverture was a common-law doctrine that treated a married woman’s legal identity as covered by her husband’s, restricting her independent rights to property, contracts, and litigation.

Feme covert: A married woman under common law, whose legal capacity was generally subsumed within her husband’s. This was the legal status coverture assigned to a wife.
English common law: A legal system developed in England through judicial decisions, customs, and statutes. Coverture developed as a doctrine of English common law.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American abolitionist and women’s-rights advocate who helped organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. She denounced married women’s legal disabilities in the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments.
Seneca Falls Convention: An 1848 women’s-rights gathering in New York that issued the Declaration of Sentiments. Its declaration condemned married women’s loss of property and legal rights.
Community property: A marital property system that treats specified assets acquired during marriage as jointly owned by spouses. It contrasts with coverture’s tendency to place a wife’s property under her husband’s control.
Feme sole: A woman legally treated as unmarried, with capacity to hold property and act in her own name. Marriage shifted a woman from this independent legal status to feme covert.
William Blackstone: An English jurist whose Commentaries on the Laws of England systematized common-law doctrine in the eighteenth century. His influential account famously described a wife’s legal existence as incorporated into her husband’s.
Lucy Stone: An American abolitionist and women’s-rights activist who campaigned for women’s legal and political equality. She used her marriage and public advocacy to protest laws that subordinated wives.
Declaration of Sentiments: A 1848 statement demanding women’s equality, modeled on the United States Declaration of Independence. It explicitly protested laws that denied married women control over property and earnings.
Dower: A widow’s traditional life interest in part of her deceased husband’s lands. This limited protection for wives existed within the broader coverture system.

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