As a historian, I appreciated Craig Fehrman’s reminding readers of the influence of ladies in the course of the American Revolution (“The war for independence carved out space for women’s liberty,” Concepts, April 6), but he doesn’t element the depth of ladies’s struggling because of legal guidelines that existed then, the vestiges of that are nonetheless with us.
Legally, coverture relegated married white girls to “civil death.” Fehrman alludes to coverture when he mentions that husbands “managed their wives’ property, their revenue, even their authorized identities.”
Coverture went a lot deeper than that. Married white girls had no rights to “the fruits” of their bodies and might be barred from seeing their kids. Additional, husbands had an absolute proper to sexual entry, together with rape. Legally, there have been few distinctions between married white girls and enslaved ladies and men.
Abigail Adams alluded to coverture in her well-known “Remember the Ladies” letter from 1776. She begged her husband, John, to “be extra beneficiant and beneficial to them than your ancestors,” acknowledging marriage’s injustices by proposing, “Why then, not put it out of the ability of the vicious and the Lawless to make use of us with cruelty and indignity?”
People ought to find out about coverture not simply to know the obstacles 18th-century girls confronted or the boundaries of “revolution” in 1776, but additionally as a result of coverture has by no means been absolutely abolished on this nation. Passing an Equal Rights Modification would reverse this revolutionary-era inequality. Wouldn’t that be a becoming act to have fun the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution?
Catherine Allgor
Cambridge
The author is president emerita of the Massachusetts Historic Society and a visiting scholar of historical past at Tufts College.
