List of Terms
- Clandestine:
- something done secretly; usually because it is legally or socially forbidden
- Coverture
- A legal rule in English common law that combined a woman’s legal identity into her husband’s upon being married.
- Contingent
- An event that cannot occur without preceding conditions
- Feme Sole
- A legal term to describe a woman that is either unmarried or has legal rights separate from her husband.
- Inter Alia
- Latin phrase that translates to “among other things”
- Synedoche
- A figure of speech where a part is used to represent its entirety
Takeaway
Overall, the readings this week were contradictory in essence, where one essay — that being Fiona Montgomery’s Women’s Rights: Struggles and Feminism in Britain — is an encapsulation of everything another essay — Nicola Phillips’ “Legal fiction vs. Legal facts: Common law, coverture and married women in business” — is attempting to discredit.
Montgomery provides a list of common laws from the 18th through 20th century having to do with women, their legal rights, and their place in the household, and attempts to use the existence of these laws to prove that women during the time completely lacked autonomy in the legal and economic sense.
Yet, what Phillips points out, and what I can’t help but agree with, is that these laws were incredibly nuanced, and provided women with multiple loopholes to either be seen as legally autonomous or otherwise capable of conducting business. In addition, Montgomery’s claim that women had difficulty working or creating business completely disregards the existence of the line of work that the common housewife held: dressmaking, sewing, cooking, etc. Though these occupations are often overlooked when thinking of labor, especially when compared to the traditional jobs that men conducted during the time, they are, regardless, occupations that can make profit and therefore be seen as business.
This isn’t to say that Montgomery’s article is completely lacking, though. Women by no means had it easy, especially after marriage, and as Wollstonecraft pointed out in her introduction to A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Stricture on Political and Moral Subjects, “…they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavor…to improve them,” (Wollstonecraft 24). However, what Montgomery lacks and what Phillips makes up for is the importance in society of the duties of a housewife. Women were not seen as incapable in a general sense. They were only seen as incapable of replacing or replicating the work that a man would create.