Criminal wives in the Old Bailey : crime and coverture in eighteenth-century London

Abstract

Under coverture husband and wife were one person before the law. Part of coverture was the presumption of coercion, which held that married women who committed crimes did so under the direction of their husbands, and were therefore not liable for their actions. Because of this presumption, criminal historians have discounted the actions of married women accused of crime and thereby supported the eighteenth-century assertion that married women were the favourites of the law. However, studies of property and women's rights often argue that coverture was a patriarchal tool designed to maintain married women's subordination. Using the records of the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, this study seeks to account for the actions of married women accused of crime in the eighteenth century. The seemingly irreconcilable views of modern feminists and eighteenth-century legal commentators are reconciled and married women are given a place in eighteenth-century criminal history.