coverture there's a legal term giving sole authority over a woman to her father and then her husband. up next on american history tv,

a conversation from the massachusetts historical society about the history of this term in colonial marriages, and how its impact can still be seen today. >> with us tonight is doctor catherine allgor, president of massachusetts historical society. previously, she had been the dean and director of education at the huntington library in san marino, california. a former professor of history and you see presidential chair at the university of california riverside. allgor attended 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 learners price for the best dissertation in u.s. women's history. she began her teaching career at cements college and has been a fellow at the ratcliffe institute for advanced study and a visiting professor of

history at harvard university. allgor first book, parlor of politics, and which the latest washington helped build a city and government, help win the big price for the side of historians for the early american republic, and the northeast popular culture american culture association annual book award. her political biography, a perfect union, dolly madison and the creation of the american nation, was a finalist for the george washington book prize. in 2012, she published dolly madison, the queen of america. life of delhi madison. president obama appointed allgor to a presidential commission, the james mattis cindy morial foundation. doctor allgor also serves on the board of directors of the women's national history museum. i will turn things over to you now. thank you for joining us. >> hello, everyone.

good evening. amelia, how am i? you can hear me and see me? good, thank you. it is such an honor to be here today. thank you, amelia, for inviting me, and thank you ashley and out to make all the magic of tech work. before i begin i want to give a content warning. i mentioned the word rape twice. so, let us begin and let's start with my title, the word every american should know. it sounds a little bit like i'm on a crusade, and i sort of am. so, let me tell you how it started. in 2012, i was invited to a teacher training institute at mount vernon. the topic of the institute was what was going to be the next area of research in studies on the revolutionary era? so, scholars who did particular subject areas were invited, and i was invited because i am a historian of women's lives and gender and that is when i was going to speak to.

coverture, and that's the word i want every american to know, was part of my presentation. my audience was about a dozen very eminent historians, and about 60 of the very best history teachers in the country. as i talked about coverture and its role, or non role, in the american revolution. i was dismayed that none of the teachers had ever heard the word. now, the eminent historians had, but they just did not think it was very important. and that took me down a research path. ironically, i realized in sort of doing a deep dive that i had not fully understood the implications of that topic, even though i was well into my teaching career. so today, i would like to share with you what i found, as i took this journey into history, and i promise you it will be a story with a twist. so, let's start with a definition. at the time of the american revolution, american women along with their english counterparts, were legally bound under the institution of

coverture. coverture held that no female person had a legal identity. at birth, a female baby was covered by her father's identity, and then when she was married, by her husband's. husband and wife became one and that one was the husband. as a symbol of this taking biden to deep, when it took the last names of their husbands. because they could not exist legally, married women could not make contracts or be sued, so they could not own [inaudible] . married women owned nothing, not even the clothes on their backs. they had no rights to their children, so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, or vice versa, she leaves -- he leaves her, she would not see our children again. married women had no rights to their bodies. that meant a husband could have a claim to any wages generated by his wife's labor and to the

fruits of her body, that is her children, he also had absolute right to sexual access. within marriage, a woman's consent was implied, so under the law, all sex related activity, including rape, was legitimate. this total mastery of your fellow human being stopped short, but just short, of death. of course, a man was not allowed to beat his wife to death, but he could be turned. now that's the law. the law does not always reflect real life. and in truth, equity practices ensure that coverture on the ground was not as restricted as the black letter law indicated. though a woman could own nothing, men who wanted to pass their wealth through their daughters to their grandchildren devised legal ways to keep money and property out of the hands of sons-in-law's. and the demands of everyday life, and of commerce, played their own parts. but a woman could not make a contract, plenty of women did business and trade, either on their own in illegal exception,

or for absent husbands. wives often ran businesses alongside their mates, with the local community acting as monitors and enforcers. so even though the law said one thing, in practice there is a lot more latitude. and we must assume that the husbands had the right to marital relations at will, there was probably a great deal of negotiation around six. now, coverture was wet abigail adams was talking about in her famous, remember the ladies letter to john. she referenced the long-standing nature of coverture when she made him to be, quote, lord generous and favorable to them, the president they ladies, then your ancestors. abigail adams understood the corruption of absolute power is clearly as any revolutionary theorist. she said, do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.

abigail obliquely reference the shame of marital abuse when she proposed, why not, could it then not out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us, with cruelty and in dignity, with impunity? men of sense in all ages abort those customs which treat as only as the vassal's up your sex. the reason we know she's talking about physical abuse or sexual abuse is the 18th century meanings of words like ambitious and vassal's. they referred to depravity. the reason i've made this my quest, my crusade for every american to note the word coverture and what it means, is i think that we, and by that i mean scholars, teachers, educated americans alike, have not really come to terms with the idea that our founding happened with coverture in place. coverture is the ghost in our machine. and i'm referring of course to the noiseless machine james madison intended the

constitution, and indeed the whole structure of the federal government, to be. but just as there always seem to be gremlins in our most expensive cars and computers, our machine of government is haunted by the exclusion of women. and i say that anyone, well, anyone who's interested in studying about the american revolution as to learn certain terms, like republicanism and liberty and what they meant to the people of the time. in my argument simply is that coverture should be part of that historical lexicon as well. the revolution did not change culture at all. nor did the constitution, the new rights for men meant some new rights for women. just by extension, thanks to the bill rights, women partook in many of the rights that men enjoy. law protected the property of windows and single women. with their husband's permission, married women could assemble freely, practice their religion and exercise free speech. they also had the right to petition and a trial by jury, although the jury of their

peers would be made up of men. it's important jñr enjoyed none of these secondhand rights. so wives did have legal rights in extremists. so in an extreme case, a wife could divorce her husband if he committed a crime against her. and of course, slaves could not divorce their masters. and the law provided no refuge against excessive physical force for slaves. but when it came to the rights of women in particular, legally wives, the only difference between and then slave person and a married woman was that a husband could not sell his wife, or prostitute her out. but even these distinctions were shaky. some of the first person's sold in north america white women from england sold to virginia colonists as wives. the comparison between the legal status of enslaved people

and white wives is less of face to face contrast, and more of a side by side assessment. the status of both groups overlapped. there was no legal treatment for enslaved people that, at sometimes in places, did not apply to wives. marriage, undercover tour, was an oppressive system. we have a hard time really comprehending the scope and depth of that. one of the great discussions in american history generally is how colonial america instituted slavery so quickly and how it became so all encompassing fairly quickly. by the late 1600s, colonial america had one of the most total systems of slavery in the world. it was lifelong, amenable, and harrowing. i recently said that to someone and they said how can you say that. it sounds so definite.

but the truth is, slavery as an institution has been around, and i use the present tense, since biblical times. but who a slave wedges and whether a slave could change into something else, and the terms of servitude deferred all over the place. colonial laws quite quickly made the status of an enslaved person something outlasted there entire life and could not change unless they were freed by a master or bought by someone free. and it didn't just last in your lifetime. you passed it along through descendants. how did this happen? there's a lot of great books about it. and there's a lot of theories about why we ended up with this type of slavery. but the study of gendered systems like marriage can supply one important factor. it's not a coincidence that the early slave codes began with

restrictions about sex and marriage. but the slavery marriage connection goes beyond that. in short, it was easy for colonial men to construct a system of almost total control over african and then black bodies, because they had a system in place already, marriage. and it proved a highly workable model for chattel slavery, even supplying slavery with a justification based in nature. i talk about marriage legal and otherwise, but was perceived to be the natural inferiority of women to support the subordination of women in the same way the institution of slavery would go on to develop a race based biology. there is also freed blacks, but even freed blacks living in the north did not enjoy the same

full citizenship, range of citizenship, that white men did. white freed black men would say we are citizens, why can't we do that, why can't we do this. the law pointed toward women and said women are citizens and they don't vote and they don't enjoy full citizenry. it was almost a justification for keeping black men in this subordinated position. later the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments would remedy that an equity, at least in theory. it was in theory for black men, but women would remain behind as only partial citizens. i would like to get back to the idea that women enjoy ancillary rights under the new system, but only in the case of married women, if their husbands left them. sometimes, we use the phrase second class citizenship. but the contrast of liberties for men and married women was

so great that it was more a case of citizenship being at the bottom. this gets you to the question of if we are at the revolutionary moment. i will tell you that nothing happened to coverture during the revolution, but what could the founding men have done about coverture? is it fair to take them to task for not abolishing or at least amending the law in the way abigail adams asked? let's see what the founders had to save themselves. at first glance, they seem silent. you do a word search for coverture in the newspaper, he will not get much of a return. we found as historians in the past, they have let the founders off the hook around the issue of women's full citizenship. we used to say they didn't know any better and couldn't imagine other options. that's what we used to say about the issues of the founders with slavery. just as new research on race

slavery has complicated the sweeping assumption that we just didn't know, we now understand that there were moments when the framers could allow women to vote, they could have allowed married women to retain property, could have modified divorce laws, could have set aside the rule of coverture all together and started from scratch. as with the issue of slavery, in terms of the silence around the status of women, it wasn't exactly a vacuum. and when it came to examining the nature of women and their goal in the republic based on equality, this was one of those uncomfortable silences punctuated by odd outbursts, with all the tension that marks the difference between simply not seeing something and will fully ignoring it. let's go back to the adams family, for example, the uneasy silence. you may wonder how john adams replied to abigail's plea to remember the ladies, and he basically made light of the

requests. he said asked here extraordinary coat of laws, i cannot laugh. traditionally, one of the ways to dismiss female concerns has been to playfully acute power to them far beyond that of mere man. sad to say, john adams was guilty of that in his letter. in mock fear, he characterized women as quote a tribe more numerous in power than other groups of disenfranchised people. they had special power. john adams played his own variation on the old song that the law gave little power because nature gave them so much. he said we know better than to repeal our masculine systems, although they are in full force and law. you know they are little more than theory. we, men, they're not exert our power and its full latitude. we are obliged and in practice you know we are the subjects. what he is talking about and

what wakes women different is he is talking about the sexual power that women have over men, a power, unfortunately, with no power, as the law gave husbands full control over a wife's sexuality. but in this mid john adams was weaving, women were so powerful that the only thing women could cling to was the name of masters. this was turned into a sly joke about how women whipped men into subjects and with the despotism of the petticoat. as dismissive as he seemed to his wife in the latter, john adams understood the deep contradictions of the theories the colonists were used to launching a revolution. abigail is writing the letter in the spring of 1776 as we are heading towards the declaration of independence. just a month or two, a couple

months after that, remember the ladies exchange, on the eve of declaring independence, john started worrying about the core of the issues. and he did so in a letter not to her but to james sullivan, a formidable intellect in the continental congress. and the letter to sullivan, john seesawed back and forth in a rhetorical dialog as he tried to work out his figure. he has paragraphs like in theory, the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. but to what extent should we carry the principle? shall we say that every individual in the community, old and young, male and female, as well as rich and poor, must consent expressly to every act of legislation? no. this is impossible you would say. how then does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority against their well? when is the right of men to govern women without their consent? this letter is a very long,

very complicated one, mostly because john adams was struggling in this back and forth way to form a coherent argument. at some point, he seems to be arguing with himself and losing. he says why exclude women you will say because they're delicacy renders them unfit for practice and experience in the great business of life and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous care of state. besides, their intention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of children that nature has made them fitted for domestic care. that's the argument against women being politically involved. he goes on to point out that that reasoning could have applied to the general body of men who are wholly destitute of property, also too little acquainted with public affairs to form a right judgment, and to dependent upon other men to have a will of their own. so if women are busy with childcare, men might have to have allegiance to their employer.

at this point in the letter, it seems john got close to a line of logic that was a bit too scary to fall out to its conclusion. and he spends the rest of the letter focusing on whether white men of little or no property should vote. somehow, by the end of the letter, he classified property-less men along with women and children as fundamentally unfit for suffrage. in the end, in spite of his concerns, john adams throws in the towel. women cannot be given political quality because they just can't. it took a lot for john adams, which should speak to the thorny-ness of the women problem and they contested nature. here is another good example. they are having a conversation you just can't believe they're having. after the war, there was

problems with loyalist properties. on the face of, it the rules were simple. if a man left his home in the 13 colonies and fled to england, his property could be seized byr treason. q+5r his family would be deprived of the property, but also his heirs. but what, if as in several cases, the property question was not the man, but it came through his wife, that, is his wife's father had entailed land to pass through the daughter two children, bypassing the husband? in the cases that came before the court, the wives that fled the country along with their husbands, could that be interpreted as a political statement, a political action, on par with desertion? after all, lawyers for plaintiffs argued a good wife obeyed her husband and followed. such a woman might have been a patriot at heart, but her political allegiance and affiliation mattered not, as

women had little or no legal or political existence under coverture. a woman's primary allegiance was to her husband, being a part of coverture. so heirs who wanted the property that would come to them through their mothers were arguing that the wife's desertion didn't mean anything. states wanted to keep the confiscated property, and they found themselves in the novel position of arguing that women could be citizens with a responsibility to the state that they were in fact capable of treason. in martin versus massachusetts, the council for the state argued that when adam art, and mother of the plaintive james martin, chose to accompany her husband back to england, that she acted in a political capacity, thus abandoning her massachusetts property. pretty interesting. in the end, these cases were decided in a variety of ways. james martin got his mother's

property, but he was able to do so because the justice system decided his case proceeded from a very conservative point of view. they decided married women were not autonomous actors, apart from their husbands. but as i said, other cases went the other way. this demonstrates the failure to ameliorate the status. it was not unimaginable that the men constructing a new nation could have also imagined new ideas of female citizenship. people will often ask me why i study women's history, or why we should study it. i say it's because we learn things from women's lives, words, and work, that we wouldn't know otherwise. the sources provide us with new information, new historical questions, new topics, and new insights. for instance, asking the question, which i think we are asking at this point, why the

founders left coverture wholly intact as they founded a new nation and governing documents. asking that question offers a deep insight into the hearts and minds. here is my theory about why the founders did nothing about coverture, not during the constitutional convention of 1780, and not at one of many times when the states were framing and re-framing the bodies of laws throughout relating. during the constitutional era of the late 18th century, the were obsessed with the issue. it was vital to the existence of the republican experiment. historian joseph ellis frames it has the viability of the nation, i call it legitimacy, but it's the same thing. in short, no former colonist or european observer was certain that the republican experiment would work, if the united states, the union, would hold.

it was precisely this uncertainty that led men such as james madison and alexander hamilton to create the constitution in order to consolidate and shore up power and unity. this need for legitimacy to prove to themselves and to others that the united states was a real political enterprise give rise too much anxiety and fear and i think it is this anxiety by ability to prevent the framers from addressing the glaring contradiction of the category of citizenship in the air shining mission of government. as i said before, they could've done many things to have brought women into the political fold, but they chose not to. i am postulate-ing that this anxiety over legitimacy made the framers and founding men sensitive to anything that seemed to diminish or challenge their authority. in an age that equated masculinity with authority, that meant anything that made them feel or seen less than men. power over wise that coverture

gave him over wives, one could see this time in american history as a crisis of masculinity, with masculinity equaling authority and viability. the last thing now revolutionaries would do would be to call their masculine authority into question by giving their wives freedom. i also would say that looking at this legal position of married white women deepens our understanding of the constitution, especially the issue which is very alive today about citizenship. i think it offers insights about how americans get it exercised and lose it, and as i mentioned the constitution at the moment, you may be thinking where are the women -- where our women mentioned in the constitution? well, they are not actually mentioned. interestingly, the language of the constitution is surprisingly gender neutral. the framers used words like persons, inhabitants and

citizens, employing male pronouns to refer to only officeholders. it's also true that women, along with children, were counted in apportioning quotas. but nevertheless, women are not part of the constitution, and that omission, while perhaps not totally conscious, was in its weight deliberate, resting upon assumptions about whether women could be infect citizens or even on some level persons. and this partial presence, like women in the constitution, and i do use the language of being the ghost of the constitution, the ghost in the machine, but it means that there is a very different idea of citizenship present in the founding document. for the most part, we understand that -- the white male citizenship model. as well, we understand the language about enslaved people in the constitution. it reminds us what it's like to be as a person with no rights.

but white women present a third model, one that is more akin to slavery than citizenship. where if it is a kind of citizenship, it is one that is covered, partial and contingent. now, i promised a twist in the story. let me lead up to it here. i mentioned how, even though i was the professor of coverture, taking this more in-depth look really affected my teaching. so as a historian of women's lives and gender, one of my bread and butter courses, one that i had taught for years at that point, was the survey course in women's american history. it's similar to the survey courses you might remember, 15 weeks in a semester covering the topic from the 1600 to the 19 hundreds. very similar. in that course, i discuss coverture three times. the first mention of it was in week two when i talked about colonial women, that is when i introduce the definition. week four, that is when we

would talk about the remember the ladies letter. until 2012, my point about the remember the ladies letter was not that abigail adams was asking for the vote. people think they read that and that she's asking for the vote. i would point out that it was historical, that calling for women suffrage at that point would have been considered radical to the point of derangement. i point out that abigail adams was asking for something more measured and more modest, for the abolition or amendment of coverture. in postulate-ing the vote as the most radical political request abigail could make, i was unconsciously reflecting in 19th-century prejudice. yes, by 1848, female suffrage was regarded as an extreme position by most americans. it was so extreme that elizabeth katie stanton almost not included in the declaration of sentiments that was

presented at the 1848 seneca falls convention. but, i was wrong. it's 1776, it was not a crazy idea that white women with property could have been given the boat. in fact, in the first decade of the 1800s in new jersey, women of property did vote until that right was taken away from them by the jefferson neo-democrats. abigail's request about coverture, on the other hand, was the most revolutionary suggesting that she could make. that women could be all persons, full citizens, and legal entities in a new government. that they could be given control over their own labor, over their own bodies, their own children, that was the suggestion. okay, the third time i lectured about coverture came about halfway through the semester when i talked about, in 1848, the passage of the marriage women's property act in new york. the married women's property act weren't really about the rights of women, but by

allowing married women in very particular cases to own property apart from their husbands, it was the first legal crack in the law of. and that was it. that was the last time i mentioned coverture. and i could not believe that i was so injurious as to not wonder what happened after that? what's happened to coverture? and here comes the twist. we never got rid of it. legally. and this is where i can't possibly judge the founders. they did not abolish coverture, but neither did we. so what did americans do? well, we chipped at coverture over the last 300 years, but never getting rid of it completely. and knowing that explains several sort of puzzling phenomenon from the 20th century. so we get native born american women who lose their citizenship when they marry foreigners as latest the 19 fifties --

1950s. you could have been -- you family could have been in the country says the mayflower, but if you marry a foreigner than you lose your citizenship. many women were not allowed to serve on juries until well into the 20th century, marital rape was not even recognize let alone disavowed until the 1970s. and this is all about -- because coverture it's still there. and this central idea of coverture was that all women were wives. and the effect of that rendered unmarried women in all cases. so not too long ago, and i think i'm speaking about things that people in our audience remember, banks would not lend money to single women. not even when the woman in question had a job. she was actually seeking mortgage from the bank where she was a bank loan officer. even today, if a man tries to change his name to his wife's, or if you've bought property as a married woman, you run into coverture. most of the time, these vestiges of coverture are just

annoying, or even funny, but the question remains. why don't we just get rid of it? american law chipped away at coverture because, at -- as it needed to, because there was a real reluctant simply to declare women to be equal under the law. and when i realized that, i started thinking about what that would look like, equal under the law. k

to go back and go, oh, the era! that's what we needed all along. as i remember that, i begin this research journey at that symposium about what would be the next big thing. what would be the most fruitful topic in research about the american revolution. you won't be surprised that i ended my presentation with a prediction that it would be women's history, and especially coverture. and i hope this put -- this person hesitation has persuaded you as well. thanks so much. -- i hope this presentation has per se did you -- persuaded you as well. thank you so much. i turn it back over to million. >> hi, catherine. thank you so much. that was incredible. i learned so much. it's amazing. the way that the american revolution period can feel like an intellectual exercise, but it is still something that is with us today and still

impacting us. so at this time, i would like to open it up to questions. in the box at the bottom of your screen, you can go ahead and submit. we will be happy to share those with catherine. >> while we are waiting for questions, i want to show you my latest brush with coverture. >> absolutely. >> just a few days ago, we were doing something, my husband and i, in massachusetts that was unheard of, we were getting something notarized by zoom. and you have to put up your i.d. and the paper and you have to sign it and then you actually send it. so we are doing this and he asked two questions. he asked, both of us, gender neutral at this point, whether we were here of our own free will. which is odd, right? it's an odd question. then he asked if there was anyone else in the room with us. and these are all vestiges of coverage or because it used to be that the law worried about a

woman have been no power, legal power, and being made by her husband to sign over anything like that her father had gave to her. let's say the father gave the women a field. the idea was that she was supposed to keep that field. and then, the husband basically pressured her to give it to him. but they used to do is take the woman into a room and say, are you doing this of your own free will? he's not threatening you or anything like that? because we are modern, we don't talk about women in that way, so they had to make it gender-neutral. but it was this funny moment where my husband and i are sitting there and they are asking, is there anyone else in the room with you? i just thought, it's coverture. >> that's kind of amazing. so i have a question, and i guess this is maybe, i don't know, hopefully within your purview. so, it's interesting that you are talking about how women could not hold property and that it would pass from the father to her children. so this brings up marco

washington in my mind. we hear about how george freed his enslaved people when he died, but the people who were held in bondage by martha were not freed. so how does that fit in to what you are saying where women could not own property? >> yeah. when george washington married martha, her slaves became his. i'm not so familiar with the washington's, so i will be very careful about this. i think they might have entailed slaves as well so that he could not legally freedom because they were going to pass to martha's children. >> oh, so maybe that does make sense. >> does. i have to tell you, explaining entitlement has become so much easier after downtown abby. people understand the idea of passing through. >> yeah. i guess that does make sense, that that would be why. so one of the concept you kind of mentioned, but just in passing, was that [inaudible]

. i was wondering if you could tell us more about that. >> what is interesting is there's this legal exception that you could open up your business. and the 1970s, we were looking at women's history and looking for women who had careers or jobs. right? the easiest thing to do was to look at how many women in a town at applied for this thing. it was actually pretty rare. and we kept looking around and it just did not seem to make sense that it was so rare because we actually did know women who were printers or renters -- or rent taverns or had stories. what happened to be is that this is where every day life take over. women just did not bother. very few women took the steps to actually get legally sanctioned. most women and their families just did not bother. if you are living in a small town and have a store, technically you cannot make a

contract. but if you do not pay your supplier as a woman, they will not come back. so it was more that it was policed by the community. once we understood that the formal exception did not mean they were not doing it, then we discover lots and lots of women and lots and lots of things. >> great, thank you. we have a question come in. they are asking how much of coverture was carried over from british rule? >> so at some point in the colonial system, we had three forms of coverture. the british because those -- because we were british. there was a spanish form of coverture that came from spain. that was located in mostly the southwest. and then there was a french one, and everybody who remembers a streetcar named desire, and talking about the napoleon echoed, and whether that property belong to him as well. that is what is there. in fact, louisiana because they

are an exception to a lot of things, still has vestiges of that. but because the british form of coverture just became the default one. and it was a wholesale. so i should have probably contextualize this a bit more. it had been a practice in place for centuries. so when abigail adams was saying the thing about the ancient, rule she meant in centuries. but it was very likely codify and. it was in black letter law. the pope wrote about, it but only a couple of lines. it was something like the husband and wife are one. what happens in the 18th century is a great legal theorist, possibly named blackwell, he began really codifying the law. he wanted to take equity practices and streamline things,

codify things, and he actually built on this. so coverture gets reinvented, oddly enough, right before the revolutionary era. in the 17 forties, fifties, sixties, when men of the enlightenment are talking about individual liberties, blackwell is actually writing it down. so it was both ancient and it was also enlarged upon and modern. and really, it just got lifted right from british law and plunged into the american system. and if there is a lawyer out, there please correct me about blackwell. [laughs] >> we have a new question. can you comment a bit more about the significance of some of the equitable statutory and common law exceptions to coverture? for example, in pennsylvania, there was an 18th century statute preventing married

women under certain circumstances from -- >> i think we talked a bit about that. everybody had that. there was always an exception for them. you could legally do. it there had to be a man somewhere there sort of guarantee it. but what's most interesting is not that that exception existed. what's most interesting is not that the exception existed, but that it was honored in the breach. when it came to every day life, every day practice kind of took over. men and women are running businesses side by side together. there is also the deputy husband, which meant if a man was out at sea or traveling, that a woman could make contracts on his behalf to buy goods or to buy goods for the store or to sell, or whatever you needed for business.

so there is that exception, as you point out. what's much more interesting is the power of the every day. and let me just add this. i talked about how we chipped away at coverture. the other thing is coverture is very on gamely. it may look elegant to say women had no legal existence, but we actually as a country needed women to do stuff, and as we needed more women to do stuff, we would make it ok. we could hold jobs and get paid and be held to account and testify in crimes. when we needed women to step up, we had to remove some of coverture, but it was an as needed capacity. >> i think that's really interesting, especially because that's a maritime community where many were at sea.

there were women on the island, not just in pennsylvania as the question asked her. there were women conducting business on the island as well. >> let me put you on the spot for a second, amelia. what would you say is the ratio between women doing things, running businesses, making contracts, selling, and women who applied to be the exception? >> i think it changed over time. i definitely i'm not trying to get out statistics on the fly. it definitely changed over time. we had a really good situation, he did research on to petticoat road, a street on the island that had a large number of women running businesses. there is a common misconception that while the husbands were at

sea that this was a flourishing center of commerce, but it turned out it was actually more after the end of whaling on the island, and as men were leading for the gold rush and there were younger children that the women did business then. -■ú:we just have to separate tht &y actually happened. that's why i think this is such a timely conversation for us. >> may i also think mary from blackstone? thank, you mary. i appreciate it. i knew i made a mistake when i realized the books behind me are blackwell companions. [laughs] >> we had another question. what countries if any still have the law of male dominated society? >> i think that many is all i

can say. what's interesting is it's not the extreme ones you would imagine, where women can drive and don't exist his people. how it crops up and what we would consider more first world places, someone mentions a comment that in 1971, i was only allowed to have a credit card if my husband signed on as well. i was fully employed at age 21. i collect these stories of cover chair. it's easy to say that it's just sexism. it's just men dominating women. but i think it is important to see this as coverture, and we #sm

can outlaw other things. and law matters. i do believe law matters. if coverture had gone, that would not have happened. right? you could still get sexually harassed because there were not sexual harassment laws in 1971, but if we got rid of coverture, so many of these kinds of things would disappear. some of it is funny, like the one we just had that i related. some of it is serious, especially when you file your taxes as a married couple, with your name, separate names. there was a case in california that took years for a husband to switch his name to the wife's, for no reason other than it was not the thing. i am more interested in how these things crop up. i'm sure we have a lot of gardeners in the audience. it crops up in the garden and

then grows down and props up in someone else is. that's kind of like coverture. as you are a woman negotiating through the world, something will pop up, and it is because coverture is in place. it might be employment discrimination, discrimination of all kinds. >> thank you. so what would you say is the status today? >> one side discovered the cra the way columbus discovered america, i looked and there is still a movement to pass the uranium. i have read the websites and it is terrific stuff. there is always a limitation to the constitutional merit of a temporal limitation. i think it's stopped at three, and then they extended, and then that deadline passed, and now they are trying to

revitalize the movement, extend the deadline. and we are just down by two. there is definitely movement, and it's still living, the patient. and mauve -- what was most interesting was what was the argument against e.r.a., because it seems on some level like why do we need it. if we don't need, why don't we pass it anyway? suddenly, people get very exercised at the idea of passing this. there is still a lot of juice around this idea. the only argument against it was we have all these laws and this is just not a strong argument because laws change all the time. this is why you have to enshrine them in the constitution.

i think it is still alive, and if anyone out there knows more than i do, please let me know. >> we have time for just a few more questions. do we see coverture holding up more prominently in states that held longer to slavery? and could you just elaborate a bit more on louisiana, which i believe you mentioned earlier? >> louisiana coverture is interesting, and i will not expand upon it. louisiana, which is a former french coverture, has been argued by scholars both ways. in some ways, it has been argued is more restrictive than british coverture, and in others, it has been argued is giving women inadvertently more freedom. i don't know enough about both of those arguments to really be able to navigate my way in there. if i continued along this path, i really should know a lot more

about louisiana coverture. i would definitely say that one of -- that was such a smart remark. one of the traits of slave societies, there is a difference between societies with slaves and slave societies, and we have always characterized the north of the society of slaves, and a slave society in the south. the entire financial structure was under guarded by slavery. but it's true that real slave societies had much more stringent gender restrictions, both ways. women definitely second-class there. standards of masculinity and femininity are much more hardwired and much more stringent because those tensions in slave societies are about keeping this other group of people oppressed and working. right? you do that through physical

force and fear. if you are a woman who wanted to have a job, of course, that's not going to happen. but if you are the man, the first son of a family, and you had no interest in running a plantation or didn't want to oversee it, you had to. so coverture, i am sure it's not surprising, it does linger on much more. an example would be women on juries. women started serving on juries in the 19 fifties in the north and west, rather than the south. the south is much more conservative. >> i think the last question i'm seeing here is where their instances where a husband lets prevented from allowing his wife to run his business or inheritance property that you are aware of? >> if he didn't want a wife to

run his business, it just wouldn't happen. he just wouldn't permit it to happen. it had to be agreed to. there is no way she could do it without him. i do want to say, windows and single women had their property judged by law, but it was always seen as an exception. coverture presumes all women are wives. but what you don't want in a society and town, you don't want to man to die and then the woman has nothing because now she is on the public charge. there was something called windows thirds. the idea was basically if a man died the property would go to the eldest son or someone else. she would get a third, or a dour, and it would be a combination of material things like her own clothing, pots and

pans, maybe some land, maybe the house. it would be enough to keep body and soul together. it was not out of any sense of fairness. it was purely practical because they recognize that. if the guide dies, she is in trouble. >> some men would try to denied the windows thirds, and that's when equity courts would come in and be equitable and basically counteract that. >> i have certainly learned a lot this evening. i just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us tonight and to share this. >> it was my pleasure. i think this was a wonderful series and i am glancing at some of the questions and i am so help me to bring this to such a well educated and engaged audience. thank you all.

next, historian mark edward lender discusses his book, cabal!: the plot against general washington, which details a planned by a group of revolutionary war generals and politicians to relieve george washington of his continental army command. the virginia museum of history and culture hosted this event and provided the video. >> and now for today's x2pd mark lender holdsa/m american history from records university. he is professor americas of history at king university in union, new jersey, which he retired as best president for academic affairs in 2011. he is the coauthor of 11 books.