With certain of these laws--the worst ones--I cannot deal here for obvious reasons; but a few of them I may be permitted to give without offence to the modesty of any one.
Blackstone says: "By marriage the husband and 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 the husband. The husband becomes her _baron or lord_--she his _servant_. Upon this principle of the union of person in husband and wife depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities they acquire by marriage."
That is to say the husband acquires all the rights, and the wife all the disabilities; and the Church wishing to be fair has made the latter as many as possible.
"And therefore," continues Blackstone, "it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, _when single, are voided by the intermarriage_." The working of this principle has been so often illustrated as to render comment unnecessary. A wife retains no rights which her husband is bound to respect, no matter how solemn the compact before marriage, nor what her belief in its strength might have been.
Fortunately for women, happily for wives, men are more decent than their religion; and the law of custom and public opinion has largely outgrown this enactment of the Church, made when she had the power to thus degrade women and brutalize men.
"If the wife be injured in _her person or her property she can bring no action for redress_ without her husband's concurrence _and in his name_," and on the basis of loss of _her services_ to him _as a servant. "But in criminal prosecutions, it is true, the wife may be indicted and punished separately_."
*In the case of punishment the Church was entirely willing to give the devil his due. It had no ambition to deprive women of any indictments and punishments that were to be had. In this case, although the husband and wife were one, she was that one. Where privileges or property-rights were to be considered, he was the "one." Such grand reversible doctrines were always on tap with the clergy, and their barrel was always full. Truly, wives do owe much to the Church.