Free Ascent of Women by Sally Armstrong Page B

ways that oppress women such as allowing the beating of a woman or claiming that her voice carries half the weight of a man’s in court or that the father is the legal and only guardian of children? The Quran was written one hundred years after the prophet died; its suras and hadiths (the interpretation of the prophet’s words) reflect the times more than the holy man.
    By the mid-thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas was teaching Christians that women were defective men, that they were imperfect in body and soul. In his Summa Theologiae , the unfinished work he wrote as the sacred doctrine of the church, he asserts, “The inferiority of women lies not just in bodily strength but in the force of her intellect.” He was influenced by Aristotle’s reproductive biology, which claimed that women were born ofdefective sperm. The Canon Laws that followed laid out church rules and specified that women could not be witnesses in disputes or criminal proceedings; they could not practice law or medicine or hold public office; and that they suffered from the same disability of intellect as children and imbeciles. Those laws would stick to women the way barnacles attach themselves to ships until the late 1900s.
    Both Catholic and Protestant women felt the weight of the church and the edicts of men like Aquinas, and after him Martin Luther, who said, “A woman should stay at home.” A woman’s life was at the disposal of men and became embedded in the power of men. Her husband or father could deny her, beat her, even kill her; she was not a human being with rights, she was chattel. The institution of marriage was included in coverture, a legal doctrine that declared that a wife’s rights were subsumed in those of her husband. Sir William Blackstone, known as “the codifier” because he wrote commentaries that refined the laws in England in the 1780s—the same Blackstone who created the “rule of thumb,” which decreed that the width of the switch used to beat a wife or a child could be no wider than a man’s thumb—penned the principles of coverture: a husband and wife were one person under the law, and that person was the husband. A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband’s wishes, or keep money for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, she was required to surrender her wages to her husband. In certain cases, a woman did not have individual legal liability for her misdeeds, since it was legally assumed that she was acting under the orders of her husband; generally, a husband and wife were not allowed to testify either for or against each other.
    It was brilliant social commentators such as Charles Dickens who began to poke holes in religious laws and lay bare the consequences of both church and state decrees. In Oliver Twist , when Mr. Bumble is informed that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction,” Dickens coined a famous phrase with Mr. Bumble’s reply: “If the law supposes that … the law is a ass—a idiot.”
    The practice by which a woman adopts her husband’s name as her own (i.e., when Mary Smith marries John Thompson she becomes Mrs. John Thompson) is another example of coverture, and another sample of the way that laws that privileged men still cling to women’s lives. Mary Eberts says, “The doctrine of coverture is the source of many injustices [now] done away with: i.e., the right of the husband to control the wife’s property and her earnings; the exclusive right of the father to child custody; the incapacity of the wife to testify against her husband in court; etcetera. Women and their allies have been fighting these laws since the l780s.”
    The church, whether Catholic or Protestant, had always been quick to denounce women who dared to express intelligent thought and analysis. For most of its history, women largely responded to canon law not by attacking it but by delivering their views