A Favourite of the Laws
Ruth Bernard Yeazell
- Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 by Susan Staves
Harvard, 290 pp, £27.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 674 55088 9 - The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind in 18th-century England by Sylvia Harcstark Myers
Oxford, 342 pp, £35.00, August 1990, ISBN 0 19 811767 1 - Portrait of a Friendship: Drawn from New Letters of James Russell Lowell to Sybella Lady Lyttleton 1881-1891 by Alethea Hayter
Michael Russell, 267 pp, £16.95, September 1990, ISBN 0 85955 167 9 - Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America by Helena Wall
Harvard, 243 pp, £23.95, August 1990, ISBN 0 674 29958 2
In Of the Rights of Persons, the first volume of his celebrated Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), William Black stone concluded his account of how the law makes a husband and wife one person by suggesting that the legal disappearance of the married Englishwoman was effectively a tribute to her sex. ‘These are the chief legal effects of marriage during the coverture’, Blackstone wrote, ‘upon which we may observe, that even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England.’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Blackstone’s sisters now tell a different story. For Susan Staves, whose book takes its impetus both from feminism and from critical legal studies, to analyse the history of married women’s property in England is to uncover the ‘deeper’ structures of patriarchy – the system by which men manage to perpetuate their power by transmitting wealth from one generation to the next. The aim of the law, as Staves interprets it, is to ensure that women have as little independent control as possible of the wealth that passes through them.
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[*] Batsford, 1231 pp., £35, 13 September 1990, 0 7134 5848 8.
Vol. 13 No. 11 · 13 June 1991 » Ruth Bernard Yeazell » A Favourite of the Laws (print version)
pages 18-20 | 3873 words