SICK BURN, Clara Brett Martin Canada's first woman lawyer!

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The doctrine of marital unity, through which married women lost most of their rights to property, entailed a "suspension of the independent existence of the wife, and an absorption by the husband of the woman's person and all her belongings... " So wrote Clara Brett Martin, Canada's first woman lawyer, who noted the irony of the marriage ceremony, in which the husband solemnly promised to endow his wife with all his worldly goods. With veiled sarcasm*, Martin (who, incidentally, never married**) attributed the injustice of this situation to the common-law tradition that Canadians had inherited from England. "This notion of the unity of husband and wife," she wrote in 1900, "meaning thereby the suspension of the wife and the lordship of the husband, seems to have been particularly agreeable to the whole race of English jurists, tickling their grim humor and gratifying their very limited sense of the fitness of things."

—Constance Backhouse, "Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century Canada," Law and History Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Autumn, 1988)

*doesn't seem that veiled
**doesn't seem that incidental

Comments

[breathedout]

LOL excellent icon usage.

Via this Backhouse article I'm learning that there was a similar pattern of reform about coverture, too: England was putting means in place by the late 16th century, for example, by which deserted wives could protect their property and support themselves and their children in the absence of their husbands; but Canada, largely due to a less developed judiciary structure, just kept the old English common-law provisions un-reformed until the mid 19th century. Pretty wild.

[violsva]

This kind of thing is exactly why this icon exists :)

Obviously the main effect of the legal position in Canada was that people went and got divorced in the States (which comes up in L. M. Montgomery surprisingly often).

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Which is hilarious given how when Canadian marriage law was divided up between the federal government & the provinces, there was a bunch of blustering about how Canada wasn't going to be like the promiscuous US, where differing marriage laws from state to state meant that people could just go to a different state for a quickie divorce. Plainly the solution is to force people to go to the next country over rather than the next province/state!

And gosh, I don't remember anything about divorce in Montgomery at all. Like I don't even remember it existing as a possibility. Clearly I should re-read.

[violsva]

Well, at least if it involves international travel you can limit divorce to the upper classes.

I'm sure Mrs. Lynde gossips about it, but mostly I'm thinking of the less-well-known Jane of Lantern Hill, where it's a major plot point.

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Oh wow, Jane of Lantern Hill! I've read them all, but that one not since I was probably seven years old. Maybe I should revisit now that divorce is something of a pet topic of mine...