Coverture and Its Legacy in Oklahoma

A carryover from English common law, coverture was an American legal idea and practice whereby "wives were understood to be 'covered' under the civil identity of their husbands."[1] As the English jurist Sir William Blackstone expressed it in 1770, "the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing."[2]

Coverture meant that a married woman's identity was subsumed into that of her husband's. Ideally, his duty was to protect and support her. Her duty was to obey and serve him. He would work for a salary or wages and represent the family in public. She would keep the home and nurture the children. According to this arrangement, women were not legal, political, or economic actors, at least not directly. They were domestic workers. More specifically, coverture meant that a married woman could not enter into contracts. As historian Richard White puts it: "The marriage contract . . . was a contract that took away a wife's right to make future contracts." Consequently, "only an unmarried adult woman had legal standing and full control over her property."[3]

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, state laws typically called Married Women's Property Acts began to erode the older laws of coverture. Yet, as historian and legal scholar Linda K. Keber has pointed out, in spite of these legal changes "most people continued to think as the rules of coverture had taught them."[4] The cultural assumptions and legal traditions of coverture were slow to die. Along this line, Kerber points to two examples from Oklahoma history. According to one law established in Oklahoma Territory in 1893, "The husband is the head of the family. He may choose any reasonable place or mode of living and the wife must conform thereto."[5] Kerber's second illustration comes from the mid-twentieth century. Although by that time women had long since gained the constitutional right to vote in federal elections, women in Oklahoma were not permitted to hold statewide office until 1942.[6]

Notes

[1] Linda K. Kerber, "Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl's Best Friend: Another American Narrative." Daedalus 141, no. 1 (2012): 91. Accessed December 25, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23240304.

[2] Ibid., 96. Kerber, in her footnote 18, cites Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books (1770; Washington, D.C.: 1941), vol. 1, chap. 15, 443.

[3] Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 100. 

[4] Kerber, "Why Diamonds Really Are a Girl's Best Friend," 94.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 97.