students. >> gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union, but reagan met him half way, reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. >> freedom of the press, which we'll get to later, i should just mention, madison called it freedom of the use of the press and it is, indeed, freedom to print things and publish things. not a freedom for what we now refer to institutionally as the press. >> lectures and history on american history tv on cspan3 every saturday at 8:00 p.m. eastern. lectures in history is also available as a podcast. find it where you listen to podcasts. coverture is 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 colonel marriages and how its impact can still be seen today.

>> with us tonight is dr. 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. and a former professor of history and uc presidential chair at the university of california riverside. allgor attended mt. holyoke college. her dissertation received a prize as the best dissertation in american history at yale and the learner 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 advance study and visiting professor of history at harvard university. allgor's first book "parlor politics" in which ladies of washington helped build a city and government won the first

book prize for the society of historians of 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" and the queen of america mary cutts life of dolly madison. appointed allgor to presidential commission. dr. allgor also serves on the board of directors of the national women's history museum. thank you so much, catherine, for joining us tonight. i'll turn things over to you now. >> hello, everyone. good evening. amelia, how am i? you can hear me and see me? good. thank you. it's such an honor to be here today.

thank you, amelia, for inviting me and thank you, ashley and al who make all the magic of tech work. before i begin, i just want to say i want to give a content warning i mention the word rape twice. let us begin and let me start with the title of the word every american should know. sounds a little bit like i'm on a crusade and i sort of am. let me tell you how it started. in 2012 i was invited to a gilder teacher training institute at mt. vernon and 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's what i 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. and as i talked about coverture and its role or nonrole 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 didn't think it was very important and that took me down a research path. and ironically i realized in sort of doing a deep dive into coverture that i hadn't fully understood the implications of that topic, even though i was well into my teaching career. so, today i'd 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 the 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 husbands. husband and wife became one and that one was the husband. as a symbol of the subsuming of identity, women 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 nottl married womeny 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 he leaves her, she would not see her 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. his total mastery of this 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 beat her. now that's the law. the law doesn't 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 and the demands of everyday life and commerce play their own parts. though a woman could not make a contract, plenty of women did business and trade either on their own in a legal exception call or for absent husbands. wives often ran businesses alongside their mates with the local community acting as

monitors and enforcers. 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 sex. now, coverture was what abigail adams was talking about in her famous remember the ladies letter to john. she referenced the long-standing nature of coverture when she more generous and favorable to them, than your ancestors. abigail adams understood the corruption of absolute power as clearly as any revolutionary theirrist. she said, do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. abigail even obliquely referred to the shame of marital rape and physical abuse when she proposed why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the

lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. men in sense of all ages which treat us only as the vessels of your sex. and the reason we know she's talking about physical abuse or sexual abuse is the 18th century meanings of words like vicious and vassals and they refer to depravity. the reason i made this my quest, my crusade for every american to know the word coverture and what it means is that i think we, 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 most expensive cars and computers, our machine of government is haunted by the

exclusion of women. and i say that anyone who is interested in studying about the american revolution has to learn certain terms like liberty and what they meant to the people of the time and my argument is that coverture should be part of that historical lexicon, as well. the revolution did not change coverture at all. nor did the constitution. though new rights for men meant some new rights for women. just by extension, thanks to the bill of rights, women partook in many of the rights that men enjoy. law protected the property of widows 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 trial by jury although the jury of their peers would be made up of men. now, it's important to understand that enslaved people enjoyed none of these second-hand rights.

so, wives did have legal rights and extremmests. in an extreme case a wife could divorce her husband or swear out a warrant against him 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 as specifically women, wives legally the only difference between an enslaved person and a married woman was that a husband could not sell his wife the compaison between did not apply

to wives. marriage under coverture was an oppressive system and we have a hard time really comprehending the scope and death of that. one of the great discussions in american history generally is how colonel america instituted slavery so quickly and all incompassing meaning by the late 1600s colonel america it was life long immunetable and inheritable and i said that to someone and they said, what? 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, you know, since biblical times we know that.

but who a slave was and whether a slave could stay a slave or change into something and how long their terms of servitude differed all over the place but, again, the colonel laws quite quickly made the status of an enslaved person something that lasted their entire life and could not change unless they were freed by a master or bought by somebody and freed and it was inheritable. that is it didn't just last for your lifetime and you passed it on through your descendants. there is a lot of theories about why we ended up with this type of slavery. but the study of gendered systems like marriage could imply one important factor. not a coincidence that it began with restrictions about sex and marriage but the slavery marriage connection goes beyond that. in short, it was easy for colonel men to construct a

system of almost total control over african and black bodies because they had a system in place already. it was marriage. and it proved a highly workable model for chattel slavery and even supplying slavery based in nature. marriage, legal and otherwise, used what they perceived to be the natural inferiority of women to naturalize the in the same way the institution of slavery would go on to develop a race-based biology. indeed, it's interesting when you look at the 19th century when after the american revolution there are enslaved black people but also free blacks. but even freed blacks living in the north didn't enjoy the same full citizenship, the range of citizenship that white men did. and when freed black men in the early 19th century why don't we get to do this and why don't we

get to do this and why don't we get to vote? but the law pointed towards women and said women are citizens and they don't vote and they don't enjoy full citizenry and almost a justification for keeping black men in this kind of subordinant position. later the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments would in theory for black men but women would remain behind only partial citizens. so i'd like to get back to the idea that women enjoyed ancillary rights under the new system. as i mentioned, they could assemble freely, petitions and only in the case of married women if their husbands left them. sometimes we use the phrase second class citizenship but really the contrast in liberty for men and married women was so great it was more a case of searage citizenship. really the bottom of the boat. so, this gets us to the question if we're at the revolutionary moment and i'm going to tell you

that nothing happened to coverture during the revolution, but we can ask ourselves what the founding men could have done about coverture. is it fair to take them to task for not abolishing or amending the law in the way that abigail adams asked. well, let's see what the founders had to say for themselves and at first glance they seem rather silent. if you do a word search for coverture in the newspapers, for instance, you're not going to get much of a return. and, so, we feminist historians in the past have let the founders off the hook around the issue of women's full citizenship. we used to say that they just didn't know any better, they couldn't imagine other options. that is, of course, what we used to say about the issues of the founders in slavery. but, just as new research on race and slavery has complicated that sweeping assumption that they just didn't know, we now understand that this was a moment or many moments when the framers could have allowed women of property to vote, they could

have allowed married women to retain property, could have modified divorce laws or set aside the rule of coverture altogether and started from scratch. as with the issue of slavery, it turns out the silence around the status of women wasn't exactly a vacuum. when it came to examining the nature of women and their role in a 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 willfully ignoring it. so, let's go back to the adams for an example of the uneasy silence. you may wonder how john adams replied to the plea to remember the ladies and basically made light of his wife's request. he said as to your extraordinary code of laws i cannot but laugh. traditionally one of the ways to dismiss female concerns is to

playfully impute power to them far beyond that of mere men and sad to say john adams was guilty of that in his letter. in mock fear he characterized women as a tribe more numerous and powerful as other groups of disenfranchised people. john adams played his own variation that the law gave women little power because nature gave them so much. depend upon it he teased, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems although they are in fullx-■ you know theyclt5a■ are little than theory. we men dare not exert our power in its full latitude. we are obliged to go fair and softly and in practice you know we are the subjects. and what he's talking about and what makes women different from other disenfranchised groups he is talking about the sexual power that women have over men, a power unfortunately with no power as the law gave husbands

total control over wive's sexuality. but in this little fantasy that john adams is weaving, apparently women were so powerful that the only thing men could cling to, he said, was the name of masters. he even turned abigail's concern about the physical and sexual abuse of women into a sly joke about how women whipped men into the despotism of the petticoat. but as dismissive as he seemed to his wife in that 1776 letter, john adams understood the deep contradictions and the were use revolution. abigail is writing this letter in the spring of 1776 as, you know, we're heading towards the declaration of independence and really this official break from great britain. so, really, just a month or two, couple months after that remember the ladies exchange. on the eve of declaring independence, john started worrying about the core of the issues that abigail had raised and he did so in a letter not to

her, but to james sullivan, who was a formidable intellect in the continental congress. in his letter to sullivan, john seesawed back and forth in a rhetorical dialogue as he tried to work out his thinking. so he has paragraphs like in theory, the only moral foundation of government is the consent of the people. but to what extent shall we carry a principle? shall we say every individual of the community, young and old and male and female as well as rich and poor must consent expressly to ever act of legislation? no, you will say. this is impossible. how then does the right arise in the majority to govern the minority against their will? when rises the right of men to govern women without their consent. now this letter is a very long, complicated one mostly because john adams was struggling in this back and forth way to form an argument. at some point he seems to be

arguing with himself and losing. he says why exclude women? you will say because their delicacy renders them unfit for practs and experience in the great business of life and the hardy enterprises of war, as well as the arduous care of state. besides, their attention is so much engaged with the necessary nurture of their children that nature has made them fittest for domestic cares. that's their argument against women being politically evolved. but he goes on to point out that that reasoning could apply to the general body of men who, quote, are holy destitute of property and also too little acquainted to form a right judgment and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own. so, if women are busy with child care, men might have to have allegiance to say their employer. at this point of the letter it seems john got a little too close to a line of logic that was a little bit too scary to follow to his conclusion and he spends the rest of the letter

focusing on the issue of whether white men of little or no property should vote. so somehow by the end of the letter he could class propertyless men 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 equality because they just can't. it took a lot to befuddle the john adams which should give testimony to the women problem. and the contested nature of the seeming silence. here's another good example, i think, where they're having a conversation that you just can't believe they're having. so after the war, there was the problem of the loyalist properties. so, on the face of it, the rules were simple. if a loyalless man left his home in the 13 colonies and fled

england his property could be seized as punishment for treason and, obviously, not only would the man and his family be deprived of the property but so would his heirs. but what if in several prominent cases the property in question was not the man's but came through his wife that is his wife's father had entailed land to pass through her father to her children basically bypassing the husband. yes, in the cases that came before the court the wives had fled the country along with their husbands but could that be interpreted as a political statement, a political action on par with a man's desertion? after all, lawyers for plaintiffs argued a good wife obeyed her husband and followed him. such a woman might have been a patriot at heart but her political allegiance or affiliation mattered no as women had little or no political existence or coverture. a woman's primary responsibility was to her husband, not the

state. that's the hard cover whicher. so, you can see heirs who wanted that property that would come to them from their mother's argued that the wife's disersion didn't mean anything. now 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, counsel for the state argued that when anna martin, the mother of the mroif james martin chose to accompany her husband back to england that she acted in a political capacity, thus abandoning her massachusetts property. pretty interesting. now, in the end, these cases were decided in a variety of ways. in the case of james martin, he got his mother's proper, which is undoubtedly what she would have wanted. but he was able to do so because the justices who decided his case proceeded from a very conservative point of view. they decided that married women

were not autonomous actors apart from their husbands but as i said, other cases went the other way. and moments like this demonstrate that the failure to status of women was not unimaginable that the men who are constructing a new nation could have also imagined new ideas of female citizenship. you know, people will often ask me why i study women's history or why we should study and i say it's because we learn things from women's lives, words and work that we wouldn't know otherwise. their sources provide us with new information, new historical questions and new topics and new insights. for instance, asking the question, which i think we're at this point, why the founders left coverture wholly in tact as they crafted new nation and documents i think asking that questions offers a deep insight

into hair hearts and minds. here's my theory on why they did nothing about coverture. not about the constitutionalb convention in and not one at many times when the states were framing and reframing new bodies of law throughout the late 18th and 19th century. here it is. during the constitutional era, late 18th century, the framers were obsessed with an issue. one that was vital to the existence of the republican experiment. historian joseph ellis frames this as the viability of the nation, i call it legitimacy, but the same thing. in short, no oneer caulinest or observer was sure it 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 consulidate and shore up power and union. this need for legitimacy to

prove to themselves and to others that the united states was a real political enterprise gave rise to much anxiety and fear and i think it is this anxiety of viability that prevented the framers from addressing the glaring contradiction of the category of citizenship in their shiny new machine of government. as i said before, they could have done many things to have brought women into the political fold, but they chose not to. i am poschewilating that this anxiety over legitimacy made the framers and founding men sensitive to anything that would seem to have diminish or challenge their authority. in an age that equated masculinity with authority, that meant anything that made them feel or seem less than men. seeding the power over wives that coverture gave them would be such an act not only for them in their hearts, but also in the eyes of the world. one could see this time in american history as a crisis of

masculinity with masculinity equaling authority and viability. the last thing the male revolutionaries would do is 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 in the issue which is very alive today about citizenship. i think it offers insights about how americans get exercise and lose it. at this moment as i'm mentioning the constitution you might be thinking where are women mentioned in the constitution? well, you may ask, they are not, actually, mentioned. interestingly the language of the constitution is surprisingly gender neutral. the framers use words like persons, inhabitance and citizens employing male pronouns to office holders. itser are also true women along with children were in quotas but nevertheless women are not part

of the constitution. and that omission, well perhaps not totally conscious, was in its way deliberate resting upon assumptions about whether women could be, in fact, citizens or even on some level persons. and this partial presence of women in the constitution and i do use, again, the language of being ghosts in the constitution. ghosts 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 the white male citizenship model that is the obvious one. that is who the constitution is about. as well we understand the status of the stateless, the language about enslaved people in the constitution reminds us what it means to be a person with no rights. but married white women present a third model, one that is more akin to slavery than citizenship or if it is a kind of citizenship, it is one that is covered, partial and contingent.

now, i promised a twist in the story. and let me lead up to it here. i mention 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 i taught for years the survey course in american women's history. similar to the survey courses you probably remember like 15 weeks in a semester covering the topic from 1600 to 1900 so dash through american history. very similar. and in that course, i discuss ho)háhp &hc% the first mention of it was week two when i talked about colonel women, that's when i introduced the definition. week four, that was when we would talk about abigail adams and remember the ladies letter. now, until 2012, my point about

the remembers ladies letter was not that abigail was asking for the vote, so people read that and think she's asking for the vote. i would point out that this was a historical that calling for women's suffrage in 1776 would have been seen as radical to the point of dur aingement and asking for the amendment of coverture. and imposchewilating the vote i was unconsciously reflecting a 19th century prejudice. yes, by 1848, female suffrage was regarded as an extreme position by most americans. it was so extreme that elizabeth cady stanton almost didn't include it at the scenical falls convention. but i was wrong. in 1776, it wasn't a crazy idea

that white women with property could have been given the vote. 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 jeff sewnian democrats. abigail's right about coverture was the suggestion that she could make that women could be whole persons and full citizens and legal entities in the new government. that, what, they could be given control over their own labor, their own bodies and their own children. that is a radical 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 married women's property acts in new york. the married women's property acts by allow married women in very particular cases to own property apart from their husbands, you know, it was the first legal crack in the law of coverture. and that was it.

that was the last time i mentioned coverture. and i couldn't believe that i was so incurious as to not to wonder. what happened after that? what 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 didn't abolish coverture but neither did we. so what did. americans do? 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 last, from the 20th century. so, we get native-born american women who lose their citizenship when they marry foreigners as late as the 1950s. you could be an american-born woman and your family has been in the country since the mayflower but if you marry the wrong foreigner, you lose it.

thus encroaching on one of the most fundamental constitutional rights. marital rape wasn't even recognized yet alone disavowed until the 1970s. this is all because coverture is still there. and the central idea of coverture was that all women were wives and the effect of that rendered unmarried women null cases. so not too long ago and i think i'm speaking about things that people in our audience remember, banks wouldn't lend money to single women, not even in the case i found when the woman in question had a job. she was actually seeking mortgage from the bank where she was the bank loan officer. even today if a man tries to change his name to his wife's or if you bought property as a married woman, you run into coverture. the question remains, why don't we just get rid of it? american law chipped away at coverture because, as it needed

to, because there was a real reluctance simply to declare women to be equal under the law. and i realized that and i started thinking what would that look like equal under the law and, of course, i went right back to slavery and, you know, we didn't pass laws against slavery because laws can be overturned and changed and they can differ from state to state to get rid of slivery, at least in theory what was needed was a constitutional amendment. three of them. i started thinking about a constitutional amendment and something about that seemed familiar. and then i remembered in the haze of my teenage years when i really wasn't paying too much attention to what was happening in the world there was this thing called the e.r.a. a constitutional amendment that declared women to be equal under the law. and so imagine my astonishment to go back and go, oh, the e.r.a., that's what we needed all along. as i wind up, remember that i began this research journey at that symposium about what would

be the next big thing. what was going to be the most fruitful topic in research around the american revolution and 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 presentation has persuaded you, as well. thank you so much. and i'm turning it back over to amelia. >> hi, catherine. thank you so much. that was incredible. i feel like it's just, i learned so much. it is amazing the way that, in a way that the american revolution can feel like an intellectual exercise but something still with us today and impacting us in 2020. so, at this time, i'd like to open it up to questions. a box at the bottom of your screen. if you want to go ahead and

submit, we'll be happy to share those with catherine. >> and while we're waiting for questions, i want to show you my latest brush with coverture. >> absolutely. >> so, just a couple days ago we were doing something, my husband and i in massachusetts was unheard of, but we were getting something notarized by zoom and you have to put up your i.d. and put up the paper and you sign it and then you actually send it. so, we're doing this and he asks 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. that's an odd question. and then asked if there was anyone else in the room with us. and these are all vestiges of coverture because it used to be that the law worried about a woman having no power, legal power and being made by her husband to sign over anything like that her father gave to her. so, let's say the father gave the woman or willed her a field

and the idea was that she was supposed to keep that field. and the husband pressured her, basically, to give it to him. so, what they're asking and what they used to do is take the woman into a room and say are you doing this of your free will, these he's not threatening to beat you or something. because we are modern, we don't talk about women in that way. it was gender neutral and my husband and i are sitting there and saying is there anyone else in the room with you and 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 talking about how women couldn't hold property and that could pass through from the father, you know, to her children. so this kind of brings up in my mind martha washington. we hear about how george freed his enslaved people when he died but the women or the people that were held in bondage by martha

were not freed. so, how does that fit in to what you're saying where women couldn't own property? >> actually when george washington married martha, her slaves became his. i'm not so familiar with the washington so i'm going to be really careful about this. i think they might have entailed slaves, too, so he could not legally free them because they were going to pass to martha's children. >> oh, so maybe that does make sense. >> it does make sense. i have to tell you explaining entailment is so much easier after "downton abby." people understand. >> one of the concepts you mentioned but just in passing was and i wonder if you could tell us more about that. >> so, what's interesting is there's this legal exception that you could get this, you know, accepted and you could open up your business.

so, we were even thinking about coverture in the 1970s we were looking at women's history and looking for women who had careers or jobs. look for how many women in the job applied and actually it was pretty rare. you know. and we kept looking around and it soon made sense that it was so rare because we did actually know women who were printers or ran taverns and had stores. and what it turned out to be is that this is where everyday life takes over. women just didn't bother. so, very few women took the steps to actually get legally sanctioned. most women and their families just didn't bother. if you're living in a small town and you've got a store, technically you can't make a contract. but if you don't pay your supplier as a woman, they're not going to come back. so, it was more, it was kind of policed by the community and once we understood that the formal exception didn't mean that they weren't doing it, then

we discovered lots and lots of women doing lots and lots of things. >> great, thank you. we had a question come in and they're asking, how much of coverture was carried over from british rule? >> so, at some point in the colonel system we had three forms of coverture. the british because those were british, we were british. i'll say we, but the colonist. and located in mostly the southwest and then there was a french one and everybody who remembers stanley kolowski talking about the code and whether that property bell reave belonged to him, as well. that's what is there. in fact, louisiana, because they're an exception to a lot of things still has that coverture. but because the british, the british form of coverture just

became the default. and it was wholesale. so, i should have probably, coverture had been a practice in place for centuries. so, when abigail adams is saying the thing about the ancient rule, she means for centuries. but it was very lightly codified. black letter law i co-wrote about it but it was a couple lines. something like the husband and wife are one and that one is a husband. what happens in the 18th century is, i will say blackwell, great legal thaurrist whose name is possibly blackwell, he began codifying law. he really wanted to put law and streamline things and codify things and he actually built on this. so coverture gets reinvented oddly enough right before the

revolutionary era. you know in the 1740s, '50s, '60s when men of the enlightenment are talking about freedom and individual liberties, blackwell is actually buttoning this stuff down. so, it was both ancient and it was also enlarged modern and really just got lifted right from british law and plunked right in to the american system. and if there's a lawyer out there please correct me if i mean blackwell. >> so, we have a new question. so could 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 permitting married women under certain circumstances to conduct business. >> i think we talked a little bit about that. everybody had that in pennsylvania, but everybody because it came from british

law. there was always an exception for that. so you could legally do it. there had to be a man somewhere there to sort of guarantee it. but what's most interesting is not that that exception existed, i think what's most interesting is not that that exception existed, but that it was, what to you call, honored in the breach. now when it came to everyday life, everyday practice kind of took over. so men and women are running businesses side by side together, there's also the deputy husband which meant that if a man was out at sea or traveling in some way and that a woman could make contracts on his behalf, you know, to buy goods or to buy goods for the store or sell or, you know, whatever you needed for business. so, there is that exception as you point out. but i think what is so much more interesting is it's always the power of the every day took over

over. and let me just add this, i talked about how we chipped away at coverture, the other thing is coverture is very ungangly. it may look elegant to say women had no legal existence, but we actually as a country, we needed women to do stuff. and as we needed more women to do stuff, we would make it okay. you know, that we couldn't hold jobs and get paid and be held to account and testify in crimes. you know, when we needed women to step up, we had to remove some of coverture. but definitely in an as-needed capacity. >> yeah, i think that's really interesting especially on nantucket because maritime community where many husbands were at sea and there were women on the island, not just in pennsylvania as the question asker, you know, gave as an example, but, you know, there were women conducting business on the island, as well.

>> let me put you on the spot, amelia, for a second. what would you say is the ratio or between women doing things, running businesses, making contracts, selling, and people, women who applied for the exception? >> well, i think it changed over time. so, i definitely am not trying to give out statistics here on the fly. but definitely changed over time. so when we actually had a really great presentation over the summer from michael harrison who did some research in peticoat row which was a street on the island that had a large number of women-ran businesses. a misconception that the husbands were at sea and this was a flourishing center of commerce run by women hence

petticoat row but on the island and as men were kind of leaving for the gold rush and there were older men on the island or younger children. i think it's an area for more research for sure to separate that myth from what actually happened. so, that's why i think this is such a timely conversation for us. >> and may i always thank mary heen for blackstone. thank you, mary, i appreciate it. i knew i made a mistake when i realize the books behind me are blackwell companions. >> so, we had another question. what other countries, if any, still maintain the law of male-dominated society? >> i think that, you know, many is all i can say. and i think what's interesting is not the extreme ones that you would imagine. you know, where women can't

drive and they don't exist as people and they always have to be accompanied by male. but how it kind of crops up in what we could consider more first-world places. so, and there's somebody who is just mentioning a comment that in 1971 i was only allowed to have a credit card my husband signed on to. i was fully in age at 21. i collect these stories of coverture, 1971 was not that far away. sexism, men dominating women. but i think there's certain, it's important to see this as coverture and that it can be, we can't outlaw sexism but outlaw other things and law matters. i actually do believe law matters. so, if coverture had gone, that would not have happened. now, you can still get sexually

harassed because there wasn't sexual harassment laws in 1971, but if we got rid of coverture, so many things like this would kind of disappear. as i said, some of it funny. like the one we just had that i related and some of it is funny and some is serious, especially if you file your taxes as a married couple with your name, separate names. there's a case in california that took years for a husband to switch his name to his wife for no reason except that it was not the thing. so, i'm more interested in how these things kind of crop up. and that we recognize it a little bit like, i don't know if we have, i'm sure we have a lot of gardeners in the audience, something called weed and it basically grows under the ground and pop up in your garden and grow under ground and pop up in someone else's garden. that's coverture. as you're a woman and negotiating through the world and something will pop up and it

is because coverture is in place and it might be employment discrimination, discriminations of all kinds. >> thank you, yeah. so, what would you say is the status of the e.r.a. today? >> yeah, so, once i discovered the e.r.a. like, you know, rediscovered it the way columbus discovered america i looked and there is still a movement to pass the e.r.a. and, you know, i read the websites and terrific stuff. there was always a limitation to constitutional merit, a temporal limitation. i think it stopped at three. and then they extended and then that deadline passed and now they're trying to resurrect. they basically want to revitalize the movement, extend the deadline and i think virginia, so, we're just down by two. so, there is definitely movement and it's still, you know, it's

the patient is still alive. if there is anything else i wanted to say about it. oh, in a lot of ways most interested in was not all the good support for e.r.a., but what was the argument against it? because it seems on some level like why do we need it? if we don't need it, let's pass it anyway. no, no, no. suddenly people get very exercised at the thought of passing this. obviously, still a lot of juice around this idea. and the only really argument against it was we have all these laws. and this is just not a strong argument because laws change all the time and, you know, laws change all the time. this is why you have to enshrine it in the constitution. i think it's still alive. if anybody out there knows more than i do about that, please, let me know. >> so, we have time for just a few more questions. so, one that has come up is do

we see coverture holding up more prominent in states that held longer to slavery? and could you just elaborate a bit more on louisiana, which i believe you mentioned earlier. >> yeah. louisiana coverture is interesting and i'm not going to expound on it because there is something, louisiana, which is, of course, a former french coverture has been argued by scholars both ways. it's in some ways it's been argued as more restrictive than british coverture and in others it's argued as 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. that's something, if i continue along this path i should really know more about louisiana coverture. and i would definitely say that one of the, that was such a smart remark. one of the traits of slave

society, so there's a difference between society with slaves and slave societies. and we've always characterized the north as a society with slaves and the south as slave societies. when you consider that all of america's financial infrastructure, we may have to pass on that a little bit. but it is true that real slave societies have much more stringent gender restrictions. both ways, women definitely second class there. but masculinity and femininity are much more hard wired and much more stringent because those tension in slave societies is about keeping this other group of people oppressed and working, right. you do that through physical force and fear. and the world has to be much more vigilant and order. so if you were a woman who wanted to have a job, of course,

that's not going to happen. but if you were a man, the first son of a family and you had no interest in, you know, running a plantation or didn't want to oversee that, tough. you had to do that. so, coverture issues and i'm sure it's not surprising do linger on much more. so, and an example would be women on jury. women started serving on juries in the 1940s and '50s in the north and the west. rather than the south. so, definitely the south is much more conservative. >> so, i think the last question that i'm seeing here are are there instances where a husband was prevented from allowing his wife from running his business or inherent his property that you are aware of? >> yeah, so, the property, i mean, if he didn't want a wife to run his business, it just wouldn't'8h:< happen. he just wouldn't permit it to happen.nstáñi

had to be agreed to by him. no way she could do it without him. inheriting property is inest thering. widows and single women had their property protected by law, but it was always seen as an exception, right. because coverture presus all women are wives. what you don't want in town is a man to die and the woman has nothing, right. because now she's on the public charge. so, there was something called widow's thirds. so, the idea was basically if a man died and his property was to go to the eldest son or to somebody else, she would get a third or her dower they called it and some combination of material things like her own clothes, pots and pans, maybe some land, maybe the house. you know, 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 recognized that if the guy dies and gives everything away, she has nothing and she's in dire poverty. now, some men were kind of mean and they would actually try to deny the widow's thirds and that's when the equity courts would come in and be equitable and basically counteract that. >> well, this has been fascinating and i have certainly learned a lot thing evening and 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 is a wonderful series and i'm glancing some of the questions and i'm so happy to bring this to such a well-educated and engaged audience. thank you, all. >> week nights this month, we're featuring american history tv programs as a preview of what's available every weekend on cspan-3. tonight we look at the apollo space program. less than one year after the nearly disastrous "apollo 13"

mission that failed to land on the moon and barely made it back to earth, "apollo 14" astronauts blasted off on january 31st 1971. a nasa in 1971. this is a documentary about the third successful mission to land on the moon. it is named after a crater where they touched down and spent about nine hours over two walks collecting specimens on the moon. >> american history tv on c-span 3 exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. coming up this weekend, saturday at 2:00 p.m. eastern, vincent brooks on african-american service and modern day challenges with bill whittaker. and sunday, the nasa film,

"apollo 14." the third successful mission to the moon. and on sunday at 6:00 p.m., we explore a recreated 17th century colonial village depicted in 1627. at 6:30, a discussion on the post world war i era in the u.s. with u.s. army command and general staff college professor richard faulkner. exploring the american story. watch american history tv this weekend on c-span 3. next,