... having been breathed out

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."