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Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World, edited by Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring; pp. xiii + 282. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013, $110.00, $32.95 paper.
The essays collected together in Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World draw upon the contributions to a 2011 conference sponsored by St. Mary's University and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Taken together they demonstrate the lively state of research being carried on at the intersection of legal history and social history. The essays offer a wide chronological coverage, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, enhancing our understanding of the deep background to the mid-nineteenth century upswell of reform initiatives that challenged the primacy of coverture in defining the legal status of wives under the common law. The collection contains much of interest to scholars of the nineteenth century, even though most essays treat episodes that occurred in earlier periods. Utilizing a variety of approaches to the archival record, they address critical questions such as: what were the drivers for change in fortifying or dismantling the coverture regime? To what extent was coverture a hegemonic system, either among legal authorities or among a wider public? How did the agency of litigants, especially women, manifest itself in the various courts that considered cases involving questions of coverture? Three of these essays directly address the interplay of different interests in producing changes in the operation of coverture. In "'Concealing Him from Creditors': How Couples Contributed to the Passage of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act," Mary Beth Combs uses chancery court records about bankruptcy disputes to show the rise of a concern about the role of coverture in thwarting the collection of debts. The wish to hold wives responsible for the debts they incurred for themselves or on behalf of their husbands thus motivated one source of support for this reform in the law. Barbara J. Todd, in "Written in...