A critical history of the laws governing married women's property in England. Analyzing the laws and the ideology underpinning them, Staves (English, Brandeis U

England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did

Explaining the curious legal doctrine of "coverture," William Blackstone famously declared that "by marriage, husband and wife are one person at law." This "cov

A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and n

Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns,