Coverture

Title: Coverture
Description: Coverture is the principle stemming from English Common Law that regulated women’s legal rights after marriage. Under coverture, feme sole, unmarried women, retained property and could make legal contracts under their own names, while feme covert, married women, had their legal personhood absorbed by their husbands upon marriage, and no longer retained the right to their own bodily autonomy or property. While women’s rights within marriage were improved through various Married Women’s Property Acts in the nineteenth century, legacies of coverture persist through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both law and culture, such as the right to credit and access to birth control as a single woman.

Title: Coverture
Description: Coverture is the principle stemming from English Common Law that regulated women’s legal rights after marriage. Under coverture, feme sole, unmarried women, retained property and could make legal contracts under their own names, while feme covert, married women, had their legal personhood absorbed by their husbands upon marriage, and no longer retained the right to their own bodily autonomy or property. While women’s rights within marriage were improved through various Married Women’s Property Acts in the nineteenth century, legacies of coverture persist through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both law and culture, such as the right to credit and access to birth control as a single woman.

Description