When Your Money Is Not Your Own: Coverture and Married Women In Business in Colonial New South Wales

Abstract

In 1860 and again in 1864, Alexander Spiers appeared before the insolvency court in Sydney, endeavoring to explain his failure in business. He was described as a milliner in the records but he had never made a bonnet in his life. The real milliner and businesswoman was his wife, Ann Spiers, who had been running her business since her marriage in 1846. She made purchasing and pricing decisions, managed staff, was the front person in the shop, and advertised in newspapers. She told the insolvency court in 1860 that her husband "used to keep the books and attend to the house business but he never sold anything in the shop. He used to mark the goods occasionally." Alexander Spiers similarly distanced himself. "My wife put the value upon the articles in our stock," he said. "She is much better acquainted with their value than myself." In spite of this, it was Alexander Spiers' name that was on the insolvency papers. Under the law of coverture, he was responsible for his wife's debts and her business legally belonged to him. 1 Ann Spiers is one of many married women who conducted businesses in nineteenth century Sydney in New South Wales (NSW), and across the Anglophone world, in spite of their legal disabilities. 2 Taking a stroll down Pitt Street, one of the principal streets in Sydney in 1858, a visitor would have encountered Mrs. White the fruiterer, Mrs. Robson the milliner, and Mrs. Doak the straw bonnet maker. There was Mrs. Stitt at her baby linen warehouse; Mrs. Foans, Mrs. Cowell, and Mrs. Palmer in their hotels; neighbours and drapers, Mrs. Tuting and Mrs. Farmer; two more milliners, Mrs. Bynon and Mrs. Stone; the French teacher Madame Dutruc; Mrs. Stephens in her circulating library; and Mrs. Atkins, monthly nurse. 3This period in the British world has been seen as the apogee of the Victorian ideology of female domesticity, with its separation of public and private. 4 Women were regarded as doyennes of home and hearth, supportive of, but subordinate to, their breadwinning husbands. Going into business is often depicted as having been the last resort for a desperate spinster or widow, devoid of male financial support; but many women in business, such as those mentioned above, were wives and mothers. These women were running businesses; but legally, as shown in the example of Ann and Alexander Spiers, those businesses did not belong to them. The money they made was not their own.The Victorian ideology of domesticity was underpinned by a legal system that dictated that wives were under the protection or "cover" of their husbands. The law of coverture ensured that "by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, and that one is the husband." 5 Husbands were deemed responsible for the maintenance of their wives, and controlled any property or income that their wives owned. Wives could not sue or be sued in court apart from their husbands, could not enter into contracts or go into debt independently, and were regarded as acting as their husbands' 2. Recent international scholarship has uncovered their p...

Mergers and Legal Fictions: Coverture and Intermarried Women in India

“…12 While many feminist historians are deeply critical of coverture as the veiling of women's personhoods by their husbands, and point to the reforms needed to uncover this enfolding, 13 others, like Erickson, have pointed to how women often harnessed their merged status to their advantage, for example to protect them from creditors, especially if they were living separately from their husbands. 14 Interestingly, Erickson claims that because of the suffocating effects of coverture, especially on elite women with natal property, English law produced and utilized more and more complex financial instruments to circumvent the forms of accumulation enforced by coverture. The settlement and trust were such instruments, and it is this perhaps implicit entanglement of kinship and property that emerged in much of my research with Parsis in Mumbai.…”