Abstract
This entry summarizes the most consequential laws pertaining to English married women in the early modern period. It introduces the main legal jurisdictions—common law, ecclesiastical, and equity—that impacted married women’s lives and describes, in particular, the common law’s doctrine of coverture, the laws governing custody of children, and the regulation of domestic violence. Women’s print responses to the laws affecting married women appeared in a range of genres, including parliamentary petitions and prose polemics, several of which are identified. This entry also introduces the laws governing marital breakdown, including separation and divorce, in the early modern period. It summarizes the few existing pamphlets written by women about their matrimonial suits and focuses on Elizabeth With’s poetic volume, Elizabeth Fools Warning (1659), which provides a rare first-person account in print of marital abuse and desertion from a woman’s point-of-view.
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Further Reading
Crawford, Patricia. 1985. “Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700”. In Women in English Society 1500–1800, edited by Mary Prior, 211–31. London: Metheun.
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Smith, Hilda L. 1982. Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Turner, David M. 2002. Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Greenberg, L. (2023). Married Women and the Law in Print. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_22-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01537-4_22-2
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