ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and discusses Romantic women’s contributions to the economics of marriage. It begins with a historical overview of the legal and economic effects of matrimony on English women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on the legal principle of coverture. In subsequent subchapters, Joanna Rostek focusses on the following texts by women economists, who all criticise economic inequalities between husbands and wives sanctioned by the institution of marriage: Sarah Chapone’s pamphlet Hardships of the English Laws (1735); Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798); Mary Hays’s pamphlet Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798) and Mary Robinson’s public Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799). The destructive consequences of coverture for women are the subject matter of a short final section on the testimonies of poet and novelist Charlotte Smith and governess Nelly Weeton.
