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Brewer reviews Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia by Linda L. Sturtz.
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Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia * Linda L. Sturtz * New York: Routledge, 2002 * xvi, 278 pp. * $23.95
Within Her Power is a rich examination of women's legal status in colonial Virginia that avoids stale generalizations and challenges generations of assumptions. Sturtz pushes us far beyond what historians have simplistically understood as the guidelines of the common law, helping us to understand the limits of the concept of "femme covert." Especially, her findings challenge us to think more in terms of families and less in terms of individuals (whether women or men) in the early modern period.
Her subtlety on the femme covert question is impressive. What emerges is that many women acted through the courts as legal entities, even when married. For example, in her final chapter, "Madam and Co.," she lays out Virginia women's extensive involvement in family businesses, especially involving Atlantic trading networks. She likewise offers many examples of women in merchants' record books, showing how married women often purchased and often with their own resources, selling chickens and eggs, for example, in exchange for finished cloth. She shows married women defending themselves, representing themselves (and their economic activities), and acting as attorneys for their husbands. Likewise, she offers numerous examples of married women using the law to collect debts.
At the same time her findings challenge the simplistically broad understanding of femme covert that historians have taken from Blackstone, Sturtz makes it clear that femme covert could be a real (though more limited) constraint. Married women selling property often had to rely on their husbands' willingness to be responsible for their debts, even though they could sometimes circumvent this restriction with, for example, their own economic activities. Selling property without a husband's consent was the core of the femme covert restriction, one that posed real women with real problems, especially when husbands had been absent for a period of years. In two fascinating early eighteenth-century cases, the Virginia legislature passed bills to allow abandoned wives to sell property in order to circumvent this common law restriction-both bills were subsequently vetoed by the king.
The larger question is how to understand the wonderful details that Sturtz has uncovered. Her embedded analysis does not step back quite enough to look at the bigger picture. Perhaps the deviations from Blackstone's prescriptions that she describes were not simply struggles about how the common law should be enforced, but about what the law was. She interprets the king's veto of the two Virginia bills granting married women the right to sell property as evidence of England being reactionary and Virginia progressive on questions of women's rights. But perhaps the king's veto (which followed his Privy Council's recommendation) was part of a broader controversy raging during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about women's legal status-something our pat understanding of femme covert has long submerged. Indeed, arguably the Privy Council was worried about how the Virginia precedent would affect English policy on what was then the core restraint of femme covert: the selling of family property. Selling family property was a key issue for the English elite during this period. Restraints on selling family property, including entails and other powerful restrictions that no longer exist in modern law, existed for many people, not simply women. My sense is that Sturtz's focus on families rather than individuals in the structuring of legal norms is a more powerful analytical tool in making sense of her evidence that even she gives it credit for (pun intended). In other words, the restriction on married women selling property was one of many restraints that propped up the elite, despite the emerging power and influence of merchants. This might make Virginians indeed "progressive" in a narrow sense, though it is not clear that they wanted their precedents (these individual bills) to be broadly applied. The writing is also dense in places, forcing the reader to concentrate to get through the author's many rich examples.
These reservations aside, there is no doubt that this book will help to transform our understanding of women's legal status in the colonial period.
Reviewed by Holly Brewer, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of "Age of Reason? Children, Testimony, and Consent in Early America," in Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (2001).
Copyright Virginia Historical Society 2004