Finn, Margot. "Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760-1860." The Historical Journal 39 (1996), 703-722.

Full text link

This article examines the methods by which married women of the time period enacted a system of evasion that led to contradictions between the political mandates of coverture--laws depriving wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own name--and the actual cultural developments. That is not to say, however, that Finn claims the laws were entirely innocuous and entirely subverted: rather, she paints a portrait of 'suspended animation,' showing that though "wives' legal inability to contract and litigate debts was often ignored or attenuated in practice, the norms of coverture shaped or animated women's experience of debt even in their suspensions" (707). This acknowledgment broadens our understanding of contemporary literary works, the "efflorescence of didactic literature condemning married women's increasingly uncontrolled consumption during a period in which wives' formal economic rights appear to have been diminishing" (707). Concurrently, the article shows how the English economy functioned and expanded despite Britain's refusal to allow legal female involvement.

Three sections enumerate the complex relationship between legal theory and economic practice. Wives were able and willing to purchase 'necessary' goods with their husbands' credit; they used this ability to establish a kind of independence from unfortunate marriages; and they had an accepted legal voice in the large system of local small claims courts. The history of debt litigation, marital breakdown, court transcripts, legal documents, archival evidence, newspaper accounts, and personal narratives provide the evidence for Finn's argument. Ultimately, Finn argues against criticism that elides women's importance in establishing middle-class morality and discounts courts' successful economic authority. To study just the private or just the public side of a wife's life, Finn says, "is to ignore the strategies and devices that allowed both men and women to experience, promote and even enjoy the commercialization of English society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (722).

Entered by Elisa on 30 July 2004 at 11:49 AM.