Married Women's Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Virginia

Abstract

A single woman in eighteenth-century British America possessed same legal, if not political, rights as a single man, but when she married she became a feme covert, thereby undergoing a substantial change in legal status. Historians have disagreed on meaning of coverture in colonial period and in their assessments of legal relationship of wives to husbands and to system of law in general.' English common law dictated major terms of judicial arrangements for feme covert in colonies. While some historians have accepted a literal interpretation of Blackstone's famous dictum that the and wife are one and that one is husband to mean complete unity of spouses under common law, others have rejected this notion.2 The foremost twentieth-century English legal scholars, Sir William Holdsworth, Frederick Pollock, and Frederic William Maitland, have shown that married women often appeared as persons before law in England.3 Our research extends this argument to free white women in eighteenthcentury New York and Virginia. We will demonstrate that matrons in