Coverture: the Word Every American Should Know, with Catherine Allgor for NHA University
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2024
- The word that every American should know is "coverture." This holdover from our British colonial days held that married white women did not legally exist. During the American Revolution, with ideas of freedom, inalienable rights, and Enlightenment everywhere, American women had every expectation that this ancient oppression would be addressed. It was not, and the new nation began with coverture in place. It remains, like a ghost in our legal machine. Find out how coverture still haunts us and what we can do about it. The answer may surprise you!
This NHA University lecture featuring Catherine Allgor is presented by the Nantucket Historical Association. Learn more about NHA University at nha.org/learn/....
Catherine Allgor is the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society since 2017. Previously, she had been the Nadine and Robert Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, and a former Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside. Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins Scholar and received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award. Her dissertation received a prize as the best dissertation in American History at Yale and The Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in U.S. Women’s History. She began her teaching career at Simmons College and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University.
Allgor’s first book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia, 2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Annual Book Award. Her political biography, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Henry Holt, 2006), was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. In 2012, she published Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (Westview Press) and The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press). President Obama appointed Allgor to a presidential commission, The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation. Catherine Allgor also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Women’s History Museum.
Thank you for this. Two comments/questions:
1) All 5 large Anglosphere nations laws descend from English Common Law. Women's rights flowered in all 5 nations (U.K., U.S.A., New Zealand, Canada, and Australia). I read many years ago that Women's rights, especially Women's property rights, seemed to follow the frontiers in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the U.S.A. Did the distance on the frontiers from male relatives when husbands died, were seriously disabled or highly abusive make coverture a ludicrous situation and easily abuse by unscrupulous lawyers?
2) I read somewhere that Susan B. Anthony claimed the change of language from the Declaration, "All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights......" to the Constitution, "We the people......." was because of Abigail Adam's and other women requests. Is there any truth in either that Anthony claimed this or that the language was changed to fudge the issue?
I like how she explains how womens oppression didn’t exist in a vacumn.
Although the thought that people did (and still) use oppression to justify further oppression is pretty chilling.
22:30 interesting! I wonder how many times when governments were arguing in self interest, that it benifited oppressed groups? Not often i imagine, but i sure would like to hear more about these happy accidents.
Thank you for sharing this hidden history. This should be common knowledge. Coverture is the English Common Law which is the law of the land in all states except Louisiana.. Statutes abrogate Common Law.
“All men would be tyrants if they could.” Gee thanks lady
Was she wrong
😊
Why are there only men in these comments.
I would guess that they're trying to get to the bottom of feminist accusations. They're trying to figure out the truth of it all. I am, at least; and what I've been finding, time and time again, is that feminists see almost everything as an attempt to oppress women.
@@yougetagoldstar well this world was built off the patriarchy so I’m not surprised that feminist would think that.
The last question brought up the issue of a wife not inheriting her husband’s property (or only enough to keep her out of poverty and from becoming a burden for the state to care for). Do you know when that changed, since typically, now, the wife inherits everything, and children only inherit after their mother also dies? I suppose the earlier laws imagined that the son would provide for or care for his widow mother but wanted to give him/them legal access to the family fortune while the mother was still alive?
Another question: I wonder about the history of community property laws. Those seem to be based on the idea of the oneness of the “marital person.” Think of the Bezos divorce where Kate (I think that’s her name?) got almost half of the fortune. No doubt she contributed in significant ways to the success of Amazon, but Jeff Bezos’s personal gifts and vision is clearly what made Amazon what it became. She didn’t get her part of the fortune because that was the value of her personal investment, rather the law gave her that settlement because the law considered them to be one marital person. In theory then, the fortune never belonged to Jeff Bezos. It belonged to the “marital person” that included both husband and wife. Thus she rightly gets half. So my question is whether community property laws developed as a way of improving coverture laws without overturning completely the underlying principle of the oneness of the “marital person”? Or was community property always a part of coverture law?
Thank God this woman lives an ocean away from my country. You can be 100% right, I don't want to argue, but I would never ever stand a woman with these attitudes in my distant family. Im talking here from the perspective of attraction and relationship between man and woman. Horrible companions from male parspective. Ask her husband (if she dies first or he mamages to divorce)
We still have elements of couverture today. We do not allow children under 18 to make business contracts, just like women were denied in the past. But why do we do this? Do we want to oppress our children? Is that our motivation? No, very few parents want to oppress their children, we deny them equal economic rights to protect them. To protect them from being cheated by the unscrupulous and other consequences if their business contracts go wrong. This same motivation held true in the past. What were the consequences of failed business deals in historical times? Depending on the era and the person you owed money to, it could include branding, disfigurement or sometimes death. In the time under discussion it also included debtors prison. You would be imprisoned until your debt was paid, including fees for your detention. As you picture this in your imagination, do not think of the prisons we have today. Nothing that pleasant; think of the worst third world prison you have ever heard of. A large cell containing the worst people of that society - the crooks, the mentally ill and the most violent, all in one communal cell. The jailors were perhaps the worst of the lot - people with total power over the inmates. There was no organised food supplied, nor water, nor sanitation. No medical treatment and no protection from others. What would be the fate of a single woman detained under these conditions? How would the warders and the other prisoners treat her? How long would she be able to survive the abuse and how would it affect the rest of her life, once her debt was paid and she was released? How can you as a husband, father, brother protect her from this fate? By removing the risk and by making any contracts she made unenforceable on her, but enforceable on you. If she ran up debts, he would be held accountable. He would have to pay them or go to debtors prison. He would take on the responsibility. Couverture, was it imposed to oppress women, or to protect them? You make up your own mind.
Women are not children. It is not right to compare women to children. Quite honestly your little rant was sickening to read. Men do not need to protect women. And women should be able to provide for themselves. If you think that is wrong you aren’t protecting women. You are what women would need protection from Bill.
I think you have misunderstood my comment? The legal standard that we applied to men, women and children is still applied to men and children. Yes I agree women should be able to support themselves. So can we get rid of the alimony and child support obligations that men are still saddled with from couverture? Can we release the 30,000+ men from US jails who are only there because of family court orders? Sorry that the historical facts do not fit in with your ideological presuppositions. Of course I could be wrong. Men might have wanted to oppress their wives and daughters. That would explain why men only sent women into the coal mines, factories and military. So that men's lives would not be put at risk. All those poor women who died in sailing ships, exploring the world and building commercial entities! I will certainly look at the female characters in the next dramatization of Pride and Prejudice with new found respect.
@@billburr5881 oh you brought child support into this. Ok. You do know that the father is not required to pay child support. The parent the is required to pay child support is the parent that doesn’t have custody. That goes for both the mother and father. I am so sick and tired of men on the internet acting like child support is oppressing men. Stop it. Why are men so upset that they have to support or take responsibility for their child.
@@billburr5881 I did not misunderstand anything. You compared looking after our children to controlling women. And then you tried to justify it by saying that it was to protect women.
You strip someone off their right to own stuff after marriage and then use the resulting exemption from consequences of financial dealings not panning out to excuse that...that is sinister my guy.