Coverture was supposed to operate in the United States in the same way it operated in the rest of the common law world. Generally speaking, a married woman was incapable of owning property or making a ...

As a historian, I appreciated Craig Fehrman’s reminding readers of the impact of women during the American Revolution (“The war for independence carved out space for women’s liberty,” Ideas, April 6), ...

Cheryl Simon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Last week, I received an email from a reader highlighting situations where married women could not make decisions without their husbands, and asking whether a woman becomes the charge of her husband ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Legal principles of coverture written into the Indian Act continue to negatively impact the rights of Indigenous women.

In the 1840s, state legislatures began modifying the law of marital status to ease the economic distress of widows and children at the family breadwinner’s death. Insurance-related exceptions to the ...

LETTER | There are times when a law has been around for so long, no one remembers how it came about in the first place. One example is the infamous “marital rape exception” contained in Section 375 of ...