feme covert

Not only does the woman become a feme covert, she often becomes pregnant shortly after uttering those words.

Adelaide may be a feme covert, but she is ready to act in a way that fiercely challenges her husband's ownership of her.

Thus, Adelaide is given a moment in the story where she defies the role of feme covert, only to be put back into that position--as a reward--at the novel's utterly inauthentic end.

In 1797, Chief Justice Pendleton of the Virginia Supreme Court found that "[a] feme covert can't pass her legal title without a deed, accompanied by a privy examination, to evince that she does not do it under her husband's influence." (44) In 1810, the fact that a conveyance was supported only by a deed executed by a deceased woman's husband, with the record bereft of any evidence of her private examination, formed a sufficient basis for the court to void the transaction.

bequeathed, or hath, or shall descend to any feme covert, the absolute right, property and interest of such slave is thereby vested, and shall accrue to, and be vested in, the husband of such feme covert; and where any feme sole, is or shall be possessed of any slave, as of her own property, the same shall accrue to, and be absolutely vested in the husband of such feme, when she shall marry.

Not surprisingly, the defense attorneys highlighted the statutory law, including limitations on the rights of a feme covert to possess slaves in her own right or to dispose of property jointly held.

Both the conforming and dissenting interpretation of the biblical teachings on marriage and patriarchy, therefore, defined the Baptist woman's role as feme covert. Only after her husband's death did a woman's role change again.

Baptist women in the roles of daughter, feme sole, feme covert, and widow took on these roles in largely the same manner as conforming women.

The Maternal Guardian: The Commentaries's Feme Covert or Clarissa's Feme Sole?

This construction of the family, in which the father is granted complete control over his children and the mother is granted none, is the logical extension of the doctrine of feme covert. What proves illogical, however, is eighteenth-century law's application of feme covert to the family even after the father has died.

Placing Clarissa side by side with the legal treatises presents a conflicted image of maternal guardianship: according to the treatises, the widowed mother remains a feme covert parent, delegitimized as a natural replacement for the father by the 1660 statue; according to Clarissa, the widowed mother becomes the most powerful type of feme sole because she can assume all of the economic powers of the father.