"The legal effects of marriage are generally deducible from the principle of the common law by which the husband and wife are regarded as one person, and her legal existence and authority are in a degree lost or suspended during the continuance of the matrimonial union."—2 Kent's Comm. on Am. Law, 129.
"Even now, in countries of the most polished habits, a considerable latitude is allowed to marital coercion. In England the husband has the right of imposing such corporal restraints as he may deem necessary, for securing to himself the fulfillment of the obligations imposed on the wife by virtue of the marriage contract. He may, in the plenitude of his power, adopt every act of physical coercion which does not endanger the life or health of the wife, or render cohabitation unsafe."—Petersdorff's Abridgement, note.
"The husband hath, by law, power and dominion over his wife, and may keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may beat her, but not in a violent or cruel manner."—Bacon's Abridgement, title "Baron aud Feme," B. 9.
"The wife is only the servant of her husband."—Baron Alderson (Wharton's Laws relating to the Women of England), p. 168.
"It is probably not generally known, that whenever a woman has accepted an offer of marriage, all she has, or expects to have, becomes virtually the property of the man thus accepted as a husband; and no gift or deed executed by her between the period of acceptance and the marriage is held to be valid; for were she permitted to give away or otherwise settle her property, he might be disappointed in the wealth he looked to in making the offer."—Roper, Law of Husband and Wife, Book I., ch. xiii.
"A lady whose husband had been unsuccessful in business, established herself as a milliner in Manchester. After some years of toil, she realized sufficient for the family to live upon comfortably, the husband having done nothing meanwhile. They lived for a time in easy circumstances, after she gave up business, and then the husband died, bequeathing all his wife's earnings to his own illegitimate children. At the age of sixty-two, she was compelled, in order to gain her bread, to return to business."—Westminster Review, Oct., 1856.
Mr. Justice Coleridge's Judgment "in re Cochrane."—The facts were briefly these. A writ of habeas corpus had been granted to the wife, who, having been brought into the power of the husband by strategem, had since that time been kept in confinement by him. By the return to the writ, it appeared that the parties had lived together for about three years after their marriage on terms of apparent affection, and had two children; that in May, 1836, Mrs. Cochrane withdrew herself and offspring from his house and protection, and had resided away from him against his will, for nearly four years. While absent from her husband, Mrs. Cochrane had always resided with her mother, nor was there the slightest imputation on her honor. In ordering her to be restored to her husband, the learned judge, after stating the question to be whether by the common law, the husband, in order to prevent his wife from eloping, has a right to confine her in his own dwelling-house, and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite time, using no cruelty nor imposing any hardship or unnecessary restraint on his part, and on hers there being no reason from her past conduct to apprehend that she will avail herself of her absence from his control to injure either his honor or his property, stated, "That there could be no doubt of the general dominion which the law of England attributes to the husband over the wife."— 8 Dowling's P. C. 360. Quoted in Westminster Review, Oct., 1856.
III. Signs Of The Times. 1857.—It is obvious that the English common law, as above stated, is scarcely a step beyond barbarism. Yet this law remained almost unaltered in the United States, as respects woman, till the year 1848—the year of the first local Woman's Rights Convention, the first National one being held in 1850. Since then every year has brought improvements, and even those who denounce the Woman's Rights Movement, admit the value of these its results.
