The Rights of Women in the 1800s

... or the lack of them ...

Those of us who read Victorian literature, or watch period dramas on the TV or at the cinema, will be very familiar with the concept of ‘Coverture (or couverture)’, even if we didn’t actually know the word. This is the word that defined the status of a woman after she was married. While single, she had all the legal rights of an individual under the law. But once she was married, under Coverture, she lost all rights, and she forfeited all her possessions to her husband. She lost all legal status as a person, and lost any independence.

As Tim Couzens explains in his book about the Draycot Estate, there was a nationally famous example of the impact of Coverture when Lady Catherine Tylney Long, a teenage heiress, inherited the Draycot Estate in 1805, giving her an income estimated at about £2,000,000 per year in today’s money. And then she married William Wellesley-Pole, who managed to spend all the money, and earned himself the name of ‘Wicked William’.

But Coverture didn’t just apply to the ‘upper classes’, it had an impact on all women. For example, Matthew Heath was a Tailor in Sutton Benger in the early 1800s, probably living and working in a house replaced in 1889 by 32/34 High Street. (His tailor’s shop used to be an Inn in the 1700s, called ‘The Cross Keys’; but that’s another story for another day.) In his Will, dated 1832, he left all his estate to be divided equally between his daughter Sarah Sophia and his son. But in 1844, shortly before his death, he wrote a codicil in which he stated that his daughter had ‘intermarried with John Vaughan, who has since forsaken her and left her under my protection … Now I do hereby revoke all and every the several bequests given to and in favour of my said daughter.’

Matthew made sure that John Vaughan could not get his hands on the money; he changed his Will and left Sarah Sophia’s share to a relative, asking that relative to look after her best interests. The story appears to have had a happy ending; Sarah Sophia later married again, to Thomas Andrews, an ‘Innkeeper and Tea Dealer’ at The Jolly Butcher, Christian Malford. (If anybody knows where this was, please get in touch and let me know.)

Edward Giddings, a farmer of Upper Draycot, included a similar clause in his Will in 1839, in which he left the rental income from property to his daughter Ruth, ‘to and for her own sole use and benefit and not to be subject to debts or engagements of any husband with whom she may intermarry from time to time, notwithstanding any couverture’.

For more on the ‘Heiress and Wicked William’ story, see: Tim Couzens, Hand of Fate: The History of the Longs, Wellesleys and the Draycot Estate in Wiltshire (Bradford on Avon; Ex Libris Press, 2001), and especially Ch. 6.