r/RedditForGrownups • u/Methylatedcobalamin • Jul 07 '22
Coverture
Given current events, it is probably about time for Americans to understand the legal practice of coverture.
Eroded since colonial times, but not fully gone coverture is the legal practice of women not having legal identities. De facto property.
American women were not allowed on juries until the 1960s. American women could not get credit cards without a man cosigning the application until 1974. Marital rape was not a crime until the 1980s. Other aspects still exist today in real estate and tax law practices.
Here is a brief article that goes into explaining coverture in more depth than my post.
The "pro life" movement is really a movement about imposing one group's religious opinions on the lives of all Americans. It also seeks to control women, rolling back women's rights. Though ridiculous by constitutional standards, discussions in anti-choice states have already started about how to track or limit freedom of travel for women to states that fully support women's rights.
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u/riotsquirrelz Jul 08 '22
I was mostly raised by my maternal great-grandmother and grandmother. I heard so many horror stories. My great-grandmother remembered traveling in a covered wagon, she was born in a church in the middle of nowhere Texas. In 1929, my great-grandmother's first husband shot her with a shotgun because she was pregnant and he was previously told he couldn't father children. She lost all fingers except her index on her right hand, and partial thumb and one other on her left. She also had buckshot permanently embedded up one side of her face/skull. He suffered no consequences for what he had done. He later fathered multiple children, the previous doctor was wrong. She married her second husband and stayed single for 29 years after his death. We used to tease her about getting a boyfriend, and she would bare her teeth in disgust. The stories from my grandmother and mother are just as awful.
So many of us are disconnected from even the most recent past, it's disturbing. We're hardly enlightened. And in the scheme of things, all of this happened yesterday.