Sarah: States have started collecting important statistics and regulating marriage and reproduction. Examples include the prohibition of clandestine marriage, the strengthening of the legal rights of fathers over their children and laws prohibiting clandestine pregnancies, as well as growing concerns about infanticide. Growing nation-states were actively interested in social engineering, probably as a means of increasing their authority and presence in everyday life. The France, for example, in 1666, regarded procreation as a subject`s obligation to his nation and encouraged marriage and procreation by offering tax cuts to growing families. According to Chernock, „the radicals of the late Enlightenment. Formal. [This „obfuscation” and other „principles”] did not reflect the „progress” of a modern, civilized society. Rather, they were markers of past human errors and inconsistencies and therefore needed to be further revised. [21] [d] Chernock asserted that „[Edward] Christian, as editor of Blackstone`s commentaries, used his thirteenth popular edition, published in 1800, to show the possibilities of modifying the practice of obfuscation.” [16] Chernock wrote that „Christian . went on to recommend that a husband cease „to be absolutely in control of the profits of the woman`s land during the cover.” [16] Chernock reported that other men tried to modify or eliminate the obfuscation. [22] Outside the context of legitimizing property or family identity, women could effectively be transformed into non-persons.
Because they had limited means of economic survival outside of marriage, some poor women found themselves in real or virtual wards of the state or city in which they lived. In British colonial America, where institutionalizing the poor was not the norm, the appearance of a woman in the city`s poverty role probably meant little more than the city assuming even minimal financial responsibility for someone who could not do it itself. In the nineteenth century, however, poverty was considered a personal mistake, although poor women were less stigmatized than poor men until the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless, women are exposed to the impression of work and loss of independence from decisions as soon as they cross the threshold of the house of the poor. The extent of obscuration in medieval England was also relativized by the existence of female brine customs that existed in some medieval English towns. This granted them independent commercial and legal rights as if they were single. This practice is described in the chamber of Henry Darcy, Lord Mayor of London in the 1330s, which allowed married women working independently of their husbands to act as single women in all matters affecting their trade, such as renting a shop and suing for debt. [10] The custom is known to have been adopted in a number of other cities, including Bristol, Lincoln, York, Sandwich, Rye, Carlisle, Chester and Exeter. [11] Some British North American colonies also adopted this custom in the eighteenth century. [12] However, it is not clear how many women adopted this status, to what extent it was imposed by law, or whether the legal and economic independence it offered was beneficial.
[13] In English and American law, coverage refers to the legal status of women after marriage: legally, husband and wife were treated as one unit at the time of marriage. In essence, the separate legal existence of the wife in terms of property rights and certain other rights has disappeared. In some cultures, particularly in the English-speaking West, wives often change their surname to that of their husbands when they marry. The common law allowed any person to change his or her name for life, as long as it was not done for fraudulent purposes. Sarah: In England in the 16th and 17th centuries, this issue was hotly debated because of the tensions arising from the English Reformation. Good English Protestant women sued for divorce or single wife status on the grounds that their husbands were „recuses,” what they called Catholics who refused to submit to Henry VIII`s Church of England. English jurists have debated whether women in these situations should be able to separate their legal identity from that of their husbands. In the end, the wives of the recants generally remained female blankets, but in practice they probably had much more leeway than ordinary married women. On the positive side, refractories who were married women, unlike their husbands, were generally not punishable.
Thus, women with Protestant husbands could openly practice „illegal” religions and have no legal consequences. The principle of obfuscation was mentioned in William Blackstone`s commentaries on the laws of England in the late 18th century. Sarah: The Artificers` Statute of 1563 gave local officials the right to order unmarried women between the ages of 12 and 40 to do domestic work. These policies made sense for a patriarchal society with a growing population of single women. Somewhat worryingly, this Act of Parliament sets an age range that coincides with a woman`s most fertile years. Therefore, most historians consider this policy to be an indirect attempt to control the reproduction of unmarried women. Sarah: Cover was one of the many legal concepts that made up English common law. People throw out this concept sometimes, but few people know exactly what it means. We often call couples husband and wife. Common law in general and English common law in particular are customary law.