Throughout history wives have been the property of their husbands. Only in the past two centuries has this institution broken down in the world’s most developed regions. In America and England, the doctrine of coverture restricted women’s choices in virtually every aspect of their lives until the beginning of the 20th century. A married woman (a feme covert) could not make contracts, buy and sell property, sue or be sued, or draft wills (Joel P. Bishop, 1875; John C. Wells, 1878; John F. Kelly, 1882). Her husband owned any wages she earned, and he controlled any property she brought to the marriage. A husband also could control his wife’s economic activities outside the home, such as limiting a particular shopkeeper from selling to his wife (Marylynn Salmon, 1986). Even in the rare case of divorce, the children of the marriage fell under the father’s custody. Today the doctrine of coverture is extinct in most developed countries. Women now control rights to themselves and the products of their labor. No formal restrictions remain on a woman’s ability to own or convey title to land or other forms of real property. Women are able to contract freely and enforce their contractual rights. No formal restrictions remain on a woman’s capacity to sue or be sued in tort. Rape is no longer a crime against a husband’s property interest in his wife, but a crime in which the woman is the sole victim. No formal restrictions limit a woman’s ability to alienate her labor and own the wages she earns. Whether married or single, women today have practically all the rights of their male counterparts. We use a property-rights analysis to explain the demise of coverture in the United States. We characterize the modern property-rights structure to human beings as a system in which all adults are self-owners. Men and women have essentially equal rights and are able to contract fully inside and outside of marriage, so marriage is a share contract (Douglas W. Allen, 1992). Coverture, in contrast to self-ownership, is characterized as a principal–agent system in which the man (husband) legally owned his wife and her flow of value. Under coverture a wife was an agent, severely constrained by the system of property rights, which denied her the right to freely choose human-capital investments and consumption as well as to capture the full returns from her actions. The husband’s economic ownership was imperfect, however, allowing the woman to deviate from the man’s directives. Human ownership regimes are important because they affect incentives to acquire and develop human capital (T. W. Schultz, 1968; Stanley Engerman, 1973). In particular, we argue that economic growth with attendant increases in wealth and specialized markets leads * Geddes: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University, 107 MVR Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853, and Hoover Institution (e-mail: rrg24@cornell.edu); Lueck: Montana State University and University of Virginia School of Law (e-mail: lueck@virginia.edu). Geddes was supported by the Earhart Foundation. Lueck was supported as John M. Olin Faculty Fellow at the Yale Law School. Cynthia Powell, Hui-Ping Chao, and Mary Godfrey provided research assistance. We have also benefited from comments from Doug Allen, Lee Alston, Ian Ayres, David Barker, Parantap Basu, Gary Becker, Mary Beth Combs, Lee Craig, Joe Ferrie, Andy Hanssen, Gillian Hamilton, Shawn Kantor, Dean Lillard, Robin Lumsdaine, Steve Margolis, Joel Mokyr, Bart Moore, Lee Redding, Glen Whitman, Paul Zak, two anonymous referees, and participants in numerous seminars and conferences. 1 While married women’s property belonged to their husbands, most single women were dependents of their male relatives. Although a single woman legally had the same property rights as a man, powerful norms and private restrictions severely limited the rights of divorcees, spinsters, and widows (Mary Beth Norton, 1980). 2 We recognize a potential divergence between economic and purely legal rights because enforcement costs limit the application of legal doctrine (Yoram Barzel, 1977). Here, however, we treat economic and legal rights as virtually synonymous since coverture codified customs and norms and because coverture’s restrictions extended beyond the family into markets and society.
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Jan 1, 2024
Douglas W Allen 
Open Access