Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:18:34.306Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Married Women Bankrupts in the Age of Coverture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Karen Pearlston
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many married women with separate property held their property as stock‐in‐trade and traded independently from their husbands. However, if the business failed, a married woman trader's ability to take advantage of bankruptcy process depended on the exception to coverture according to which she held her separate property. This article is the first to examine reported bankruptcy cases involving married women in their doctrinal context and in relation to other exceptions to coverture. It analyzes the issues arising in the eighteenth century and argues that they should be understood in relation to the larger picture of married women's law, especially the law of private separation. The article also considers the oblique relationship between private separation jurisprudence and married women's bankruptcy in the nineteenth century, a relationship that was bridged by a line of cases that, on the surface, seem to be unrelated.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , Spring 2009 , pp. 265 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2009 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

Anderson, Stuart. 1984. Legislative Divorce—Law for the Aristocracy? In Law, Economy and Society, 1750–1914, ed. Rubin, G. R. and Sugarman, David, 412–44. Worcester, MA: Professional Books.Google Scholar
Abram, Annie. 1916. Women Traders in Medieval London. Economic Journal 16:276–85.Google Scholar
The Attorney's Compleat Pocket‐Book Part II. 1756. London: In the Savoy: printed by Henry Lintot; for W. Reeve.Google Scholar
Barker, Hannah. 1997. Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution: Female Involvement in the English Printing Trades, c. 1700–1840. In Gender in Eighteenth‐Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Barker, Hannah and Chalus, Elaine, 81–100. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Barker, Hannah. 2006. The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barron, Caroline M. 1989. The “Golden Age” of Women in Medieval London. In Medieval Women in Southern England. Special issue: Reading Medieval Studies 15:35–58.Google Scholar
Bateson, Mary, ed. 1904. Borough Customs. Vol. 1. London: Selden Society.Google Scholar
Berg, Maxine. 1993. Women's Property and the Industrial Revolution. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24:233–50.Google Scholar
Billinghurst, George. 1676. The Judges Resolutions Upon the Several Statutes Concerning Bankrupts with the Like Resolutions on the Statutes of 13 Eliz. And 27 Eliz. Touching Fraudulent Conveyances. London.Google Scholar
Blackstone, William. 1765. Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1. Oxford: printed at the Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Blackstone, William. 1847. Commentaries on the Laws of England. Vol. 1, ed. Wendell, John L. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
Blount, Thomas. 1670. The Several Statutes Concerning Bankrupts Methodically Digested Together with the Resolutions of Our Learned Judges on Them: As Likewise the Statutes 13th Eliz. and 27 Eliz. Touching Fraudulent Conveyances, with the Like Resolutions on Them. London: Printed for T. Twyford.Google Scholar
Christian, Edward. 1814. The Origin, Progress, and Present Practice of the Bankrupt Law. Vol. 2. London: W. Clarke.Google Scholar
Cohen, Jay. 1982. The History of Imprisonment for Debt and Its Relation to the Development of Discharge in Bankruptcy. Journal of Legal History 3:153–71.Google Scholar
The Compleat Clerk in Court; or, Practising Solicitor, in All Our Courts. 1726. London: In the Savoy: printed by E. and R. Nutt, and R. Gosling, (assigns of Edw. Sayer, Esq;) for J. Lacy; and J. Clark.Google Scholar
Comyns, Sir John. 1785. A Digest of the Law of England. Vol. 1. Dublin: Luke White.Google Scholar
Cooke, William. 1785. A Compendious System of the Bankrupt Laws. London: His Majesty's Law Printers.Google Scholar
Cooke, William. 1788. The Bankrupt Laws, 2nd ed. London: His Majesty's Law Printers.Google Scholar
Cooke, William. 1823. The Bankrupt Laws, 8th ed., ed. George Roots. London: Hunter, Clarke.Google Scholar
Dale, Marian K. 1933. The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century. Economic History Review 4 (3): 324–35.Google Scholar
Davidoff, Leonore, and Hall, Catherine. 1987. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Doggett, Maeve. 1992. Marriage, Wife‐Beating and the Law in Victorian England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.Google Scholar
Duffy, Ian P. H. 1980. English Bankrupts, 1571–1861. American Journal of Legal History 24:283–305.Google Scholar
Erickson, Amy Louise. 1993. Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Erickson, Amy Louise. 2005. Coverture and Capitalism. History Workshop Journal 59:1–16.Google Scholar
Evans, Jim. 1987. Changes in the Doctrine of Precedent during the Nineteenth Century. In Precedent in Law, ed. Goldstein, Lawrence, 35–72. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
A Gentleman of the Middle Temple. 1761. The Merchant's Lawyer: or, The Law of Trade in General. London.Google Scholar
Goodinge, Thomas. [Printed under T. G.] 1695. The Law against Bankrupts: or, a Treatise Wherein the Statutes against Bankrupts are Explained. London.Google Scholar
Goodinge, Thomas. 1701. The Law against Bankrupts: or, a Treatise Wherein the Statutes against Bankrupts are Explained, 2nd ed. London: Printed by the Assigns of Richard and Edward Atkyns, Esquires; for John Hartley, over against Grays‐Inn in Holborn.Google Scholar
Green, Edward. 1767. The Spirit of the Bankrupt Laws. London: J. Williams.Google Scholar
Green, Edward. 1776. The Spirit of the Bankrupt Laws, 3rd ed. London: J. Williams.Google Scholar
Green, Edward. 1777. The Spirit of the Bankrupt Laws, 5th ed. Dublin: J. Williams.Google Scholar
Green, Edward. 1780. The Spirit of the Bankrupt Laws, 4th ed. London: His Majesty's Law Printers.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 1991. Marital Exits and Marital Expectations in Nineteenth Century America. Georgetown Law Journal 80:95–129.Google Scholar
Hay, Douglas. 1975. Property, Authority and the Criminal Law. In Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth‐Century England, ed. Hay, Douglas, Linebaugh, Peter, and Thompson, Edward P., 17–63 New York: Pantheon.Google Scholar
Hay, Douglas. 1999. The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr. Waddington. Past and Present 162:101–62.Google Scholar
Hay, Douglas. 2004. Kenyon, Lloyd, first Baron Kenyon (1732–1802). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hoppit, Julian. 1987. Risk and Failure in English Business 1700–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, Margaret R. 1996. The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jones, N. G. 2004. Bathurst, Henry, second Earl Bathurst (1714–1794). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jones, W. J. 1979. The Foundations of English Bankruptcy: Statutes and Commissions in the Early Modern Period. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 69 (3): 1–63.Google Scholar
Kowaleski, Maryanne. 1986. Women's Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century. In Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Hanawalt, Barbara, 145–64. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Lacey, Kay E. 1985. Women and Work in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century London. In Women and Work in Pre‐Industrial England, ed. Duffin, Lorna and Charles, Lindsey, 24–82. Beckenham, UK: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Lieberman, David. 1995. Property, Commerce, and the Common Law: Attitudes to Legal Change in the Eighteenth Century. In Early Modern Conceptions of Property, ed. Staves, Susan and Brewer, John, 144–58. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lobban, Michael. 2004. Powell, John Joseph (bap. 1753, d. 1801). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McIntosh, Marjorie K. 2005. The Benefits and Drawbacks of Femme Sole Status in England, 1300–1630. Journal of British Studies 44:410–38.Google Scholar
MacQueen, John Fraser. 1849. The Rights and Liabilities of Husband and Wife. London: S. Sweet.Google Scholar
Mann, Bruce H. 2002. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Oldham, James. 1992. The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Pearlston, Karen. 2008. At the Limits of Coverture: Judicial Imagination and Women's Agency in the English Common Law. PhD diss., Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto.Google Scholar
Phillips, Nicola. 2006. Women in Business 1700–1850. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press.Google Scholar
Postema, Gerald J. 1987. Some Roots of Our Notion of Precedent. In Precedent in Law, ed. Goldstein, Lawrence, 9–33. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Powell, John Joseph. 1790. Essay Upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements. Vol. 1. London.Google Scholar
Prater, Henry. 1834. The Law Respecting Husband and Wife. London: Saunders and Benning.Google Scholar
Prior, Mary, ed. 1985. Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800. In Women in English Society 1500–1800, 93–117. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Quilter, Michael. 2004. Daniel Defoe: Bankrupt and Bankruptcy Reformer. Journal of Legal History 25 (1): 53–73.Google Scholar
Rigg, J. M. 1908. Cooke, William (1757–1832). In Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Stephen, Leslie and Lee, Sidney. Vol. 4. London: Smith, Elder & Co.Google Scholar
Roper, R. S. Dennison. 1826. A Treatise on the Law of Property Arising from the Relation Between Husband and Wife, 2nd ed. Vol. 2, ed. Jacob, Edward. London: J. Butterworth.Google Scholar
Shepard, Alexandra. 2000. Manhood, Credit and Patriarchy in Early Modern England, c.1580–1640. Past & Present 167:75–106.Google Scholar
Spring, Eileen. 1993. Law, Land & Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300–1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Staves, Susan. 1990. Married Women's Separate Property in England, 1660–1833. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, John. 1656. The Reading Upon the Statute of the Thirteenth of Elizabeth, Chapter 7 Touching Bankrupts, Learnedly and Amply Explained. London.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. 1990. Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Todd, Barbara J. 1998. “To Be Some Body”: Married Women and the Hardships of the English Laws. In Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Smith, Hilda L., 343–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Robert. 1986. Commercial Morality, the Merchant Character, and the History of the Voidable Preference. Stanford Law Review 39:3–138.Google Scholar
Wood, Thomas. 1720. An Institute of the Laws of England. London: In the Savoy: printed by Eliz. Nutt and R. Gosling (assigns Of Edw. Sayer, Esq.) for Richard Sare.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Barwell v. Brooks (1784), 3 Doug. 371, 99 Eng. Rep. 702 (KB).Google Scholar
Boggett v. Frier (1809), 11 East 301, 103 Eng. Rep. 1020 (KB).Google Scholar
Bolton v. Prentice (1744), 2 Str. 1214, 93 Eng. Rep. 1136 (KB).Google Scholar
Bowett and Langhams Case (1627), Het. 9, 124 Eng. Rep. 299 (CP).Google Scholar
Bowett & Langham (1627), Litt. 31, 124 Eng. Rep. 121 (CP).Google Scholar
Carrol v. Blencow, Esq. (1801), 4 Esp. 27, 170 Eng. Rep. 630 (NP).Google Scholar
Corbett v. Poelnitz (1785), 1 T.R 5, 99 Eng. Rep. 940 (KB).Google Scholar
Countess of Portland v. Prodgers (1689), 2 Vern. 104, 23 Eng. Rep. 677 (Chy.).Google Scholar
Cox v. Kitchin (1798), 1 B. & P. 338, 126 Eng. Rep. 938 (CP).Google Scholar
Deerly v. Dutchess of Mazarine (1697), 1 Salk. 116, 91 Eng. Rep. 107; 2 Salk. 646, 91 Eng. Rep. 547 (KB).Google Scholar
De Gaillon v. L'Aigle (1797), 1 Bos. & Pul. 8, 126 Eng. Rep. 747 (CP).Google Scholar
De Gaillon v. L'Aigle (1798), 1 Bos. & Pul. 357, 126 Eng. Rep. 950 (CP).Google Scholar
De Gaillon v. L'Aigle (1799), 1 Bos. & Pul. 368, 126 Eng. Rep. 957 (CP).Google Scholar
Derry v. Duke of Mazarine (1697), 1 Raym. Ld. 147, 91 Eng. Rep. 995 (KB).Google Scholar
Derry v. Dutchess of Mazarine (1697), Comb. 402, 90 Eng. Rep. 555 (KB).Google Scholar
Ex parte Carrington (1739), 1 Atk. 206, 26 Eng. Rep. 134 (Chy.).Google Scholar
Ex parte Franks, in the Matter of Kezia Franks, a Bankrupt (1831), 7 Bing. 762, 131 Eng. Rep. 295; 1 Moore & Scott 1 (CP).Google Scholar
Ex parte Holland (1835), 1 Deac. Bank. Cas. 75.Google Scholar
Ex parte Mary Anne Johnson (1830), 1 Ir. L. Rec. 309.Google Scholar
Ex parte Mear (1787), 2 Bro. C.C. 266, 29 Eng. Rep. 146 (Chy.).Google Scholar
Ex parte Preston (1772); Green, The Spirit of the Bankrupt Laws, 3rd ed. 9; Cooke, The Bankrupt Laws, 22 (Chy.).Google Scholar
Fitzer v. Fitzer and Stephens (1742), 2 Atk. 512, 26 Eng. Rep. 708 (Chy.).Google Scholar
Franks v. Duchess de la Pienne (1797), 2 Esp. 587, 170 Eng. Rep. 464 (KB).Google Scholar
Gittins v. Cowper (1609), 2 Brownl. 217, 123 Eng. Rep. 906 (KB).Google Scholar
Haslington v. Gill (1784), 3 T.R. 620, 100 Eng. Rep. 766 (KB).Google Scholar
Haslington and Another v. Gill and Another (1784), 3 Doug 415, 99 Eng. Rep. 725 (KB).Google Scholar
Hatchett and Another v. Baddeley (1776), 2 Bl. W. 1079, 96 Eng. Rep. 636 (CP).Google Scholar
Jewson v. Read (1773), Lofft 134, 98 Eng. Rep. 573 (KB).Google Scholar
Kay v. Duchesse de Pienne (1811), 3 Camp.123, 170 Eng. Rep. 1327 (NP).Google Scholar
Langham against the Wife of John Bewett (1628), Cro.Car. 68, 79 Eng. Rep. 661 (CP).Google Scholar
Lavie v. Phillips (1765), 3 Burr. 1776, 97 Eng. Rep. 1094 (KB).Google Scholar
La Vie v. Philips (1765), 1 Bl. R. 570, 96 Eng. Rep. 329 (KB).Google Scholar
Lean v. Schutz (1778), 2 Bl. W. 1195, 96 Eng. Rep. 704 (CP).Google Scholar
Marshall v. Mary Rutton (1800), 8 T.R. 545, 101 Eng. Rep. 1538 (KB).Google Scholar
Marsh v. Hutchinson (1800), 2 Bos. & Pul. 226, 126 Eng. Rep. 1249 (CP).Google Scholar
Newsome v. Bowyer (1729), 3 P. Wms 38, 24 Eng. Rep. 960 (Chy).Google Scholar
Queen v. Robinson (1867), C.C.R. 80.Google Scholar
Re E. M. Butler (1863), 7 L.T. N.S. 866.Google Scholar
Ringsted v. Lady Lanesborough (1783), 3 Doug. 197, 99 Eng. Rep. 610 (KB).Google Scholar
Sparrow v. Carruthers (n.d.), unreported.Google Scholar
Stantons Case (1583), 135 Moo. KB, 72 Eng. Rep. 489.Google Scholar
Walford v. Duchess of Pienne (1797), 2 Esp. 554, 170 Eng, Rep. 453 (NP).Google Scholar
Wilmots Case (1616), 851 Moo. KB, 72 Eng. Rep. 948.Google Scholar

Statutes

English: Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1542, 34 & 35 Hen. 8, c. 4 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1571, 13 Eliz., c. 7 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1705, 4 & 5 Anne, c. 4 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1706, 5 Anne, c. 22 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1731, 5 Geo. II, c. 30 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankrupts Act, 1825, 6 Geo. 4, c. 16 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Bankruptcy Act, 1861, c. 134 (Eng.).Google Scholar
Married Women's Property Act (1870), c. 93.Google Scholar
Canadian: Google Scholar
Family Law Reform Act, S.O. 1978, c. 2 (Ontario).Google Scholar

Archival Documents

City of London Record Office, London, UK.Google Scholar
Letter Book N, fol. 96, 28 Sept. 10 H. 8 [1519] s.v. “Sole merchaunt.Google Scholar
Lincoln's Inn Library, London, UK.Google Scholar
Ms. Misc. 895 “Reports in the King's Bench, 1765–1770,” available as fiche no. C‐498, Lavie v. Phillips, English Legal Manuscripts, v.2 (Zug, Switzerland, Inter Documentation Co., 1978).Google Scholar