Coverture, Freedom, and Entrepreneurship in the Eighteenth-Century City of London

Abstract

The unique English marital property rule of coverture, whereby a husband took possession of virtually all of his wife’s movable assets, is widely assumed to have severely inhibited married women’s ability to act as business proprietors until the rule was finally dismantled at the end of the nineteenth century. This paper assesses that assumption in light of London gild records and business cards representing married women over the long eighteenth century. The frequency of married women acting as entrepreneurs in the records suggests that they were finding ways to evade the restrictions of coverture, although the legal mechanisms by which they did so remain obscure..