“…to grant women
“equal rights” would work only gross injustice and lead to possible marital
disaster.”
- Edmund E. Shepherd, The Legal Rights of Women, 18 Law. &
Banker & S. Bench & B. Rev. 175, 180 (1925).
The fight for women’s rights seems
like it’s been going on forever; when really it’s only been going on for the
last century and a half. Which, granted, seems like a long time. A look at
history, however, brings the realization that what women have been fighting
for, and have attained, is only a little
better than what we were entitled to a thousand years ago. That’s right – women
in England in the 10th century had more legal rights than women in
the 19th century. The rights of women started to decline following
the Norman Conquest in 1066. But it wasn’t until the rise of Feudalism that the
rights of women, particularly married women, completely deteriorated under the
Common Law. The women’s rights movement as we know it today is fighting against
500 years of ingrained legal and social customs that put an entire gender on
the same level as children and the insane.
In Anglo-Saxon England, women could
and did hold and dispose of land, regardless of marital status. The names of
many women are in the Domesday Book as tenants-in-chief. Divorce was available
to both men and women, and a woman who divorced her husband retained half the
marriage gifts and, usually, her children. Women did not have rights equal to men,
but their legal personhood was intact[i].
The feudal system however, excluded
women from holding land in their own right, and this became uniform under the Common Law in the middle of the 16th century. By 1540, husbands were entitled
to lease and retain the profits of any land held by their wife. Married women
also lost the right to enter into contracts, including wills. By the end of the
16th century, a woman was a dependent to be transferred from her
father to her husband. After marriage, women had no rights to their children,
could not make wills, and had no legal rights within their marriage. Legally, a married woman did not exist
separate from her husband.
This continued for centuries,
leading the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson to remark in the 19th century
that a wife, in relation to her husband, stood “better than his dog, a little
dearer than his horse.”[ii]
It wasn’t until the abolitionist movement which was, incidentally, a female
dominated movement, that women once again found their voice.
On display now in the library lobby
is A Story of Progress and Evolution: the
Legal Rights of Women. The title is taken from one of the items on display,
Harry Hibschman’s Law Every Woman Should
Know, published in 1929. This book contains sixteen short chapters
discussing everything from a woman’s rights to her children, her liability for
her husband’s debts, and property rights. Also on display is a facsimile of the
Will of Aethelgifu, a complex
document showing how this Anglo Saxon woman’s real property and possessions
were to be distributed upon her death. This exhibit will be on display until
June 2, 2017.
