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Women, consumption and coverture in England, c. 1760–1860*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Margot Finn
Margot Finn
Affiliation:
Emory University
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Abstract

Historians concerned to demonstrate women's increasing relegation to a private, domestic sphere in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the extent to which married women's opportunities were restricted by the common law practice of coverture, which deprived wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own right. Yet social and cultural historians have argued that women played an essential role as purchasers in promoting the consumer revolution of these decades. This article explores the devices used by married women consumers to evade the strictures of coverture. Focusing on three overlapping practices – wives' willingness and ability to pledge their husbands' credit to purchase a wide range of ‘necessary’ goods, their use of this tactic to secure a degree of independence from unsuccessful marriages, and their active participation in the deliberations of a variety of small claims courts – it argues that the purchase of coverture in the sphere of consumption was partial and contested, rather than monolithic.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 703 - 722
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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35 Ibid. 1 Apr. 1858, p. 83.

36 This disability flowed directly from the suspension of the married woman's legal identity under coverture. As Thomas Peake explained, ‘no one can be a witness for himself; and it follows of course, that husband and wife, whose interests the law has united, are incompetent to give evidence on behalf of each other…and the law, considering the policy of marriage, also prevents them from giving evidence against each other; for it would be hard that the wife, who could not be a witness for her husband, should be a witness against him: such a rule would occasion implacable divisions and quarrels between them.’ Thomas, Peake, A compendium of the law of evidence (London, 1822 edn), pp. 169–70.Google Scholar

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