03-11 TABLE of CONTENTS:
The Husband and Wife Are One
DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
QUOTE by
Johnnie Tillman.
Blackstone on Women and the Law
"Throughout the seventeenth,
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, woman was considered a perpetual minor
incapable of ownership or of making her own legal decisions. Even a married
woman was a nonentity before the law.
"Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on
the Laws of England, (First edition, 1765) may be cited as giving chapter
and verse for woman's perpetual legal infancy. This work was the standard
textbook for the training of lawyers throughout the English-speaking world
up till the twentieth century.
"It contains this classic statement of the legal
position of married women: 'By
marriage the husband the wife are one person in law; that is, the very
being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage,
or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband...
'Upon
this principle of a union of person in husband and wife depend almost all
the legal rights, duties, and disabilities that either of them acquire
by the marriage .... "For this reason, a man cannot grant anything
to his wife, or enter into covenant with her; for the grant would be to
suppose her separate existence, and to covenant with her would only be
to covenant with himself; and therefore it is also generally true that
all compacts made between husband wife when signed are voided by the inter-marriage
(21st ed., London, 1862, Book I, p 441).
"Blackston's position has been summed up many times:
The husband and wife are one and it is the husband."
-- Excerpted from The Great
Ideas, 1966 edition. Ironically, Blackstone lost effectiveness quickly
in Britain, but remained THE law in the U.S. for a long time
because of the frontier quality of life in the U.S. and the shortage of
books.
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03-11 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and
EVENTS
B. 03-11-1922, Madeline Houston McWhinnery, founder of the First
Women's Bank in New York City, the first full-service U.S. commercial
bank to be predominantly owned and operated by women.
B. 03-11-1903, Dorothy Schiff Thackrey, although born to wealth,
she bolted the Republican party to engage in social welfare work. In 1939
she bought the New York Post. She wrestled it though the NYC newspaper
wars and it lasted as the only daily afternoon paper.
Event 03-11-1903, Der Wald is performed at the Metropolitan
Opera. Written by Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, it is the first opera written
by a woman to be performed in the US.
Event 03-11-1907, a number of rich and famous women of the day
including Mrs. John Jacob Astor, Maude Adams, Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Walter
Damrosch, and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney opened their own women's club The
Colony with a clubhouse at 112 Madison Ave., New York City, the first
time women had their own public gathering place.
Event 03-11-1994 - "I just can't stop
laughing, I can't stop crying," the reaction of Helen Cunliffe,
longtime advocate of the women's priest lobby, when the Church of England
voted to ordain women as priests, November 10, 1992. The first women priests
were ordained March 11, 1994 and performed their first priestly duties
Sunday March 13, 1994, Mother's Day in England.
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QUOTES DU JOUR
TILLMAN, JOHNNIE:
"In
this country, if you're one of those things - poor, black, fat, female,
middle-aged, on welfare - you count less as a human being. If you're all
those things, you don't count at all. Except as a statistic."
-- Johnnie Tillman
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