“HE HAS MADE HER…CIVILLY DEAD” (1848)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** In July of 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early organizer for women’s suffrage movements in the United States, changed the course of property rights for married women forever when she uttered a stunning declaration about their legal mortality. They were, she noted dryly, “civilly dead.” While Stanton was not attacking the institution of marriage itself, she was confronting American society with a challenge to the institution’s precepts on women’s capacities to control their very destinies. Most importantly, she believed the forfeiture of married women’s autonomy to be a mistake. As things then stood, women, as soon as they tied the proverbial knot, were in positions of almost total dependency on their husbands. The legal status of married women at the time, referred to as coverture, was famously placed into stark terms by the English jurist William Blackstone in his 18th century legal classic, Commentaries on English Law: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.” As a result of the suspended existence of married women, they could not own […]
