Saturday, June 29, 2013
Coverture
The idea of coverture made it so that women were protected by their husbands. Women had no rights and men would often be responsible for the crimes of their wives. I found it ironic how during the mid-1700's the colonists were fighting against a patriarchal society, yet in certain aspects they continued to reinforce paternalistic ideas, such as in slavery and women's rights.
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Puval,
ReplyDeleteKerber also got me thinking of Wood: coverture dovetails nicely within the framework of Wood’s hierarchy . Together, Wood and Kerber give an extremely helpful lens through which to view American history. Just like Morgan showed us how slavery arose as a part of the system that put everyone in their place, coverture is the aspect that put women in their place. This piece from Wood on republican political philosophy helps explain women’s exclusion from politics:
To be completely virtuous citizens, men—never women, because it was assumed they were never independent—had to be free from dependence and from the petty interests of the marketplace. Any loss of independence and virtue was corruption.
Kevin
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ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that it seems that only a historian, keeping within the discipline, could have written the book that Kerber wrote. I doubt if a poly scientist, a sociologist, or an anthropologist, or perhaps even a Constitutional scholar in their disciplines would have revealed the thread of meaning of the concept of coverture as an active principle of Constitutional legal theory and jurisprudence from the Revolutionary era to 1992, according to Kerber.
DeleteI agree Bryan, but did you find the connections between the broad picture of the past that Kerber drew and the current seemless? I found (especially in the first few chapters) that she painted a detailed and well-researched analysis of the past and then very briefly, with little empirical detail would draw the threads to the present. Often, it felt like, in the final few pages of the chapter. Is this unfair?
DeleteI don't find it particularly ironic. That seems to be the way history happens. Two steps forward, one step back.
ReplyDeleteI kind of agree with Hunter, though I get what you're saying about the irony, Purav. Likened to the Hartog article, history does seem to have this sick cyclical way of making progress while always reverting back to old societal norms and ways of thinking. While we attain rights for one group of people, eventually somebody is getting rights taken away or is completely left out of the equation all together.
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