Coverture Laws

The British common law doctrine of marital unity, or the notion that husband and wife were one in marriage, shaped a range of coverture laws that determined married women's status in the British colonies and in the United States. Coverture perpetuated men's control of property and authority as head of household. In concert with anti-miscegenation laws, laws defining slavery, and laws dispossessing Native Americans of land, coverture laws guaranteed that only white men were fully entitled to marriage's financial and inheritance rights. While most vestiges of coverture have vanished from U.S. law, its legacies continue to shape immigration law in ways that favor husbands and privilege heterosexual married relationships.

In the British colonies, when a woman married she lost her civil identity and became “covered” under that of her husband. Sir William Blackstone wrote in the 18th-century commentaries that codified British common law, “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.” With no legal identity of her own, she could not make contracts such as wills, buy and sell property, or decide whether or to whom children would be apprenticed. Her husband became owner of her personal property, and while a wife retained title to land she brought to a marriage, her husband managed it.

Most single women, regarded as femme sole, remained under the tutelage of fathers with their property held in trust until they married—at which time it passed to husbands. Some widows and, by the 19th century, Irish Catholic nuns, amassed wealth individually or collectively. Spanish and French colonies upheld the authority of fathers but adopted community property practices rather than coverture.

Coverture obligated wives to render domestic services. Even marital rape and domestic abuse (chastisement) were condoned under coverture.

The logic of coverture determined women's political status. When revolutionary leaders carefully maintained coverture, it followed that women would not have the right to vote since they had no public voice separate from that of their husbands.

Native American societies were not ordered by coverture. Iroquois and Cherokee society, for [Page 599]example, followed a matrilineal pattern in which lineage and land passed through the line of the mother. Policies such as the Dawes Act of 1887, which offered U.S. citizenship to individual Native Americans who accepted allotments carved out of reservation lands, undermined women's authority. The act turned native men into private landholders, farmers, and heads-of-households. This pathway to citizenship followed the logic of coverture.

While single women could receive allotments, married heads of household received larger ones, and then the property belonged to the husband. Women's path to citizenship was vague; only allottees—and thus predominantly male heads of households—were designated citizens. In 1888, Congress legislated that native women became citizens if they married white male citizens, thus becoming citizens through coverture.

African American women and men were denied the inheritance rights that coverture provided whites. Slaves were subject to laws stating that the child's condition followed the line of the mother. Slave marriages had no legal standing, making the children of enslaved women illegitimate with no rights to property or their father's name. A white slave owner might father several enslaved children and profit from their sale; he need not worry that they had any rights of inheritance. Slaves were legally forbidden from property ownership.

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