�y��vlog

"If you want to be cynical — there a lot of policies attacking women — the way it struck me, almost, was a kind of return to coverture," Zug said in a phone interview, referencing the colonial legal practice that held women had no legal identity of their own.

The concept of “coverture,” as legal commentator William Blackstone opined, made “the husband and wife … one person under law.”

Early American women were subject to laws steeped in coverture’s assumptions of gendered inequality, and these restrictions continued long after the United States won its independence from Britain.

While husbands were charged with the protection of their wives under coverture, early American law and society justified the use of violence by husbands against wives, as a “moderate correction,” to enforce women’s submission and obedience.

Married women could not own property, sign contracts, or file lawsuits under the doctrine of “coverture,” which subsumed their legal identity into that of their husband.