The Demise of Coverture

Marriage in 18^th and 19^th century America was regulated by the common law doctrine of coverture, which rendered husband and wife a single legal entity upon marriage. This “unity of person” was executed through the near complete transfer of the woman’s property rights and legal rights to her husband, prohibiting her from engaging in commerce, bringing forth lawsuits, creating wills, executing estates, entering contracts, or engaging in any other action that would require her to be legally recognized. The married woman’s subsequent inability to direct the use of any resources acquired either before or after marriage represents a diminution of her incentive to efficiently allocate her productive efforts. In all productive endeavors, a profit maximizing allocation of property rights must be consistent with the distribution of residual claimancy. In terms of a single laborer, this means that the more an individual stands to profit from the laborers productive efforts, the greater should be their control over how that labor is invested. In the beginning of the 19^thcentury, the husband held control over how his wife invested her time and resources. However, the husband’s degree of control over his wife’s property and earnings began to erode as early as 1810 through the decisions of equity courts and the adoption of Married Women’s Property Acts, state level statutes that undid the precedents set by coverture.  By the beginning of the 20^th century, the wife’s labor was almost entirely self-controlled, suggesting an evolution in the degree of residual claimancy held by husband and wife within the family. In this paper, I investigate the determinants of this evolution in residual claimancy and subsequent declines in the strength of coverture. The determinants are of two primary types: (1) factors contributing to the general rise in women’s productivity relative to men, such as urbanization and access to markets for goods produced within the household and (2) factors altering the nature of marriage, such as increasingly liberal divorce law. The analysis is conducted through comparison of these economic and social factors against the weakening of coverture as measured by the strength of the Married Women’s Property Acts in a given state and year.