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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...