ABSTRACT
‘Why is the property of the woman who commits Murder, and the property of the woman who commits Matrimony, dealt with alike by your law?’ Frances Power Cobbe had a hypothetical visitor from another world pose this question in her famous 1868 article, ‘Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors’. 2 In the nineteenth-century debates that surrounded married women’s property law, reformers frequently drew comparisons between the legal effects of crime and those of marriage. At common law, a convicted felon forfeited all possessions real and personal. All too similarly, these reformers pointed out, a woman who married lost ownership or at least control of all her possessions because of the common law fiction that a husband’s legal identity ‘covered’ that of his wife. One reformer offered the sardonic observation that
the confiscation of a man’s property is associated in our minds with felony or high treason; the confiscation of a woman’s property with marriage. Of course I mean that is the idea of the more thoughtful among us, for the ugly fact that a woman’s marriage is punished as a felony is concealed from the young under a bridal veil and orange blossoms. 3
