Feminist Lies: Women Were Never Considered “Property”
Feminists Lie.
Feminists make Pinocchio look like the Pope.
One grand, strange, deliberate feminist lie, now believed by millions, is that women have historically been considered the “property” of males and treated no better than livestock. As one Medium writer expressed it,
“… women were passed along from father to husband like a prize cow”.
This grand lie is based on a deliberate misrepresentation of “coverture”, a legal doctrine in English common law from the middle ages in which a married woman’s legal existence was considered to be merged with that of her husband, so that she had no independent legal existence of her own.
The feminist misrepresentation of coverture (1) distorts the original intent of the law, (2) ignores the advantages it bequeathed to women and the disadvantages it imposed on men, and (3) completely ignores the ways in which the law was often bypassed or simply disregarded.
The following discussion1 of coverture that contradicts the feminist claim of “women as property of males” is derived2 from the “The Evolution of Patriarchy” chapter of the book Their Angry Creed: The shocking history of feminism, and how it is destroying our way of life by British author, commentator, and blogger Herbert Purdy. (I heartily recommend this book to those who want to understand feminism’s dark, seedy history.)
Feminists Distorted the Original Intent of Coverture
Coverture is a socially protective system for women that dates back to the early 13th century Common Law of England, but probably goes much further into Anglo-Saxon times.
Coverture, which means ‘covering’… is a legal doctrine establishing that men are legally responsible for the welfare of the women in their households, whom they must take under their protection, either as husbands, or fathers.
In its most basic expression, it means men must care for women at men’s expense.
Coverture has long been part of marriage law in England. It assumed that, upon marriage, the man became his wife’s protector and provider: a role he took on from her father, whose covering was transferred in a continuous system of security for women down generations. To this day, we have the tradition of a father, with bitter sweet emotion (often reciprocated in his daughter), ‘giving away’ his daughter in marriage in a symbolic representation of historical coverture.
Note that this “giving away” his daughter is a touching act of continuous protection of women, and not the deceitful description by feminists as “women being passed along from father to husband like a prize cow”.
So, coverture, a “covering or shelter”, meant that the women were protected, from father to husband. This makes sense considering what life was like when coverture began: “nasty, brutish, and short”. Although feminists have instilled a completely negative perception of coverture, the law was for women’s protection, not to make property of them. And shown next the law made the husband responsible for the actions and debts of the wife and provided women with plenty of advantages.
Feminists Ignore the Advantages it Provided to Women and the Disadvantages it Imposed on Men,
Under coverture, a married woman became exempt from legal liability for many personal misdemeanors, since the law automatically assumed a married woman was acting under the nominal authority of her husband whom, as head of the family, was deemed to be responsible for her actions.
Ernest Belfort Bax,3 a prominent barrister and socialist propagandist, wrote this in 1910:
No [married] woman can be imprisoned for debt (‘contempt of court’) no matter what means she may possess, although her husband may be for the non-payment of her debts. Not even can her property be attached for the payment of a debt if settled on her in due form. Neither can she be served with a bankruptcy order unless in relation to a business carried on apart from her husband and in her own name. She is free to leave her husband, and he has no legal power to detain her or compel her to return. He has no control over her personal property. She, on the other hand, can obtain an order for restitution of conjugal rights, by which he is ordered to return, or she can obtain alimony or maintenance, according to her ‘station in life’. The husband is responsible for any slander or libel she may commit although he knew nothing of it or even disapproved it. He is liable, that is, for damages and costs, while she escapes with absolute impunity.
Legal coverture didn’t just apply to the civil law. Husbands also carried legal responsibility for certain categories of their wives’ criminal behavior too. The principle that all stand equal before the law was waived for married women, as Bax also points out:
Let us now turn to the criminal law. A wife enjoys, at present [early 20th century] in this country, practical immunity for all offenses of which her husband is the victim. Goal and public obloquy are the lot of the husband, as we all know, for similar offenses towards the wife. The wife, without forfeiting her right of maintenance, may insult, slander, or libel her husband. The wife is free to neglect every one of her recognized duties, while the husband has no redress. If, on the other hand, the husband neglects her he is at once liable to a police-court separation order with confiscation of property, or wages, for her maintenance.
It must be remembered here that everything of which the wife chooses to complain (e.g., coming home late at night) will be held by the Court to constitute neglect, just as everything the wife chooses to call cruelty will be construed as such by a similar chivalrous tribunal.
A husband can be arrested and imprisoned for deserting his wife, whereas a wife may desert her husband with impunity… a case is hardly known of a woman being sentenced to imprisonment for bigamy.
Men commonly receive seven years for this offense. Similarly, a woman is practically allowed full freedom to commit perjury in the Divorce Court with a view to establishing a case of adultery against her husband. Let the husband but try the same game on and he will find quite another pair of shoes awaiting him. Even if the perjury be committed to exculpate himself — a thing regarded as a matter of course in the wife — the husband is by no means secure from the danger of penal servitude.
However, the responsibilities of men in marriage under coverture continue even in these times of alleged equality. Under coverture, whilst a husband gave up all he owned to his wife upon marriage, his wife could legally keep her property separate from him.
Amazingly, under coverture, husbands were often jailed or sometimes even executed for the misdeeds of their wives4:
Marissa: On the last day of a hot and incredibly dry June, 4 criminals appeared, bound, before the bench of London’s primary criminal court, the Old Bailey. The year was 1714. Robert and Margate Cook, Thomas Davis, and Deborah Stent were facing burglary charges. The team allegedly pulled off a pewter heist in the house of Mary Mellers the month before. Robert Cook made the mistake of bragging about the crime while Margate and Deborah were caught selling off the pewterware for cash. The stakes were high. The punishment for burglary in early modern London was death.
Sarah: Without much fanfare, Robert Cook and his sidekick Thomas Davis were found guilty and sentenced to death. But Cook’s wife, Margate and her friend Deborah Stent were acquitted. Not because of insufficient evidence, or because of mitigating circumstances. But by “reason of their coverture.” The doctrine of coverture deprived married women of legal status, merging her legal personhood with her husband’s. This magical, get-out-of-jail-free-card (or judicial prejudice as legal scholars would say) preserved thousands of English women from the gallows ever since the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century.
Does this sound like women being treated as property? If so, where do I sign up?
Feminists Ignore the Ways that Coverture Was Bypassed or Simply Disregarded
And often coverture law was bypassed or simply ignored. A good example can be found in a book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South”. The book explains how slave-holding women ignored coverture to own slaves in their own right as if it never even existed. (The book also makes a convincing case that women were just as guilty in practicing slavery as men.)
Feminists who complain that women have always been oppressed by men would do themselves, and everyone else, a favor if they were to recognize the truth that under coverture and its principles (later enshrined in statute law), women had a fantastic social deal, which imposed enormous, almost unreasonable obligations on men who could not escape carrying a heavy legal responsibility for their wives, and for their children. Coverture was, by any measure, a rigorous system — for men — and it remained in force right into modern times, with important remnants of it living on in divorce law. — Their Angry Creed
For other articles about the many lies told by feminists, see my Feminist Lies section.
FOOTNOTES:
Coverture is a complex subject that this article only highlights some of the aspects. For more on the topic, see the Wikipedia entry or Google the word
Passages from Their Angry Creed have been modified for this article, but the changes don’t change the meaning of the original text.
Ernest Belfort Bax (1854–1925 )was a 19th century English barrister, journalist, philosopher, socialist, historian and one of the earliest men’s rights advocates and an ardent anti-feminist. Among many writings on the subject of men’s rights in 1896, he wrote The Legal Subjection of Men, a book described the numerous ways in which the legal code favored women to the detriment of men and boys.