Administrative Law, Legal History, Women's Studies, Women, Women and the law, Married women 

"The essays in this volume attempt to analyze the nature of married women's legal rights and disabilities prior to the spate of late nineteenth-century reforms. They are the fruits of an interdisciplinary workshop held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that brought together experts in the subject of married women and the law from the fields of history, law literature, economics, and women's studies"--Page x. 

Content:
Introduction : coverture and continuity / Tim Stretton and Krista J. Kesselring -- Discourse on the nature of coverture in the later medieval courtroom / Sara M. Butler -- Coverture and its discontents : legal fictions on and off the early modern English stage / Natasha Korda -- Poor law, coverture, and maintaining relations in King's Bench, 1601-1834 / Kim Kippen -- Coverture and the criminal law in England, 1640-1760 / Marisha Caswell -- Women and property litigation in seventeenth-century England and North America / Lindsay Moore -- The sailor's wife, war finance, and coverture in late seventeenth-century London / Margaret R. Hunt -- Written in her heart : married women's separate allegiance in English law / Barbara J. Todd -- Tapping Reeve, Nathan Dane, and James Kent : three fading federalists on marital duty / Angela Fernandez -- "Concealing him from creditors" : how couples contributed to the passage of the 1870 Married Women's Property Act / Mary Beth Combs -- Coverture and women's agency : informal modes of resistance to legal patriarchy / Danaya C. Wright. 

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Item catalogued by editor (Stretton, Tim).