Treatment of Women in Colonial Charleston

 

Treatment of Women in Colonial Charlestonⁱ

Treatment of Women Pt 1, 2, and 3

In early South Carolina, being a mother did not offer any special rights or protections in the eyes of the law. Children were a form of property, and husbands controlled the property of their wives. Women who bore children out of wedlock were guilty of the crime of bastardy (yes, South Carolina passed a law against bastardy in 1703), and guilty women were subject to fines, public humiliation, and corporal punishment. In short, our culture and laws regarded childbearing as a normal duty, not as a miracle of life worthy of celebration and protection.

Education

Speaking of apprenticeships, let’s make a brief diversion into education. Most young women in early South Carolina spent their childhood within a family household where they performed chores and learned skills like sewing and cooking that would be essential in adulthood. Girls generally received a very sparse education. Our social traditions dictated that women were destined to become wives and mothers, so book learning was generally considered a waste of expensive resources. Some young women did perform apprenticeships, however, living their teenage years in the household of another family where they worked in return for a modicum of an education. I know of no data about the frequency of this practice in South Carolina, but there are some records available in scattered sources.

For example, I’ll mention the indenture of Charlotte Philips in the year 1708. As a young teenager, Charlotte was sent by her parents to live with another family, René and Charlotte Ravenel, as a servant, until her twenty-first birthday. The document recording this arrangement survives among the Records of the Secretary of the Province, at our state archive in Columbia, is really an apprenticeship indenture, which is just a fancy name for a contract. In the document, the Ravenel family agrees to feed and protect Charlotte as long as she behaves herself. In return, they will teach Charlotte to sew, to pray, and to read (but not to write–which was a separate skill in early America). That was the extent of young Charlotte’s education, and that was not uncommon.

Marriage

The legal age at which a young woman can consent to sex is TEN. At twelve, she can be married, but only if she has the consent of her father or her guardian. Without such parental consent, no woman under the age of twenty-one can legally contract marriage. But of course exceptions were made in rural communities without much legal presence, where pre-marital children and “common law” unions were not uncommon.

All of this might sound horrible and irresponsible to us in the twenty-first century, but it’s important to remember that many young women in the early generations of South Carolina were first married at the age of fourteen or fifteen. In affluent circles, especially in urban centers like Charleston, the parents of newly-minted spinsters paraded their teenage daughters before friends and neighbors in a spectacle that we call a debut. Some people still relish this antiquated practice, but in its original form the debut was a sort of glorified cattle show, the purpose of which was the initiate the process of bidding for the opportunity to marry into a prosperous family. Of course this ritual wasn’t kind to the young women, but life expectancy was shorter then. In fact, it was not uncommon to find widowed mothers under the age of twenty. The point of all this history is not to arouse contempt for the past, but rather to underscore the fact that in earlier times a woman’s life often turned very rapidly from the innocence of childhood to the duties of marriage and the hardships of motherhood.

A woman, upon her marriage, disappeared. That is to say, her rights and her property disappeared by melding into that of her husband. In the words of the great English legal scholar, William Blackstone, “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.” This legal phenomenon is known as the “doctrine of coverture.” A married woman is, in the legal Latin of old English, a “feme covert.” The husband speaks for the wife and takes control of any property she might have brought to the marriage, but he is also obliged to care for and protect her and the offspring they produce. Whatever property or wealth she brought to the marriage is her dowry, and it immediately becomes his property.

A married woman had a one-third interest in all of her husband’s property, and this interest was called her dower. If a husband wanted to sell a piece of real estate, therefore, his wife had to sign a separate document called a “renunciation of dower,” in which she acknowledged that she consented to the sale without coercion. Even if the husband did coerce his wife into signing the renunciation, a woman in the early days of South Carolina had little option but to bend to the will of her husband. You might think this sounds like a quaint, ancient practice, but the state of South Carolina required married women to sign “renunciations of dower” until the year 1984. Sounds incredible, right? But this fact underscores the deep roots of our state’s legal framework.

In all matters, civil and criminal, a husband spoke for and represented his wife. Married women could not enter into contracts, sue or be sued, or even complain, in their own person. Furthermore, since a husband was answerable for a wife’s misbehavior, the law empowered him to correct, restrain, and chastise his wife, “within reasonable bounds,” as William Blackstone observed. In the conclusion to Chapter 15 of Blackstone’s famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, the author even added the following patronizing comment on women’s rights: “Even the disabilities which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England.”

Property

woman’s property could be protected from her husband’s potential ill management through a legal instrument called a “marriage settlement,” which was usually, but not always created just prior to a marriage. This settlement is a tripartite agreement between a woman, her husband-to-be, and a neutral trustee who was usually a member of the woman’s extended family. By placing a woman’s property in the hands of a third party, her fortune or dower rights would be legally off-limits from her husband’s potential meddling or debts. Besides protecting a wife from her husband’s potential for bad investments or bad behavior, the marriage settlement also allowed family property to pass legally from one generation to another through a matrilineal line. Furthermore, in case of her husband’s death, the woman with a marriage settlement enjoyed legal powers over his estate that ordinary women could only dream of.

Women as Business Owners

The marriage settlement offered rich women a modicum of independence from their husbands, but women of more modest means had a legal avenue to greater mobility as well. A married woman, legally a feme covert, could become a feme sole, that is, a business woman independent of her husband’s finances. Like the rest of our legal framework, this practice came to us from England, and was fairly common in the urban society of colonial Charleston. To become a feme sole, a woman’s husband first had to execute a contract, like a performance bond, with another man, pledging not to meddle in his wife’s business affairs. Of course a woman had to convince her husband to allow her to engage in business, and, as you can imagine, conversations about this topic took place almost exclusively in working-class households, where the wife’s extra income might be greatly appreciated.

For example, in the summer of 1768 Mrs. Mary Stevens convinced her husband to allow her to become a feme sole. The Stevens family had recently moved from England to Savannah to Charleston, and Mr. John Stevens was employed as a music teacher and organist at St. Michael’s Church. John drafted a contract with his neighbor, a baker named James Wright, pledging to forfeit a sum of money if he interfered in his wife’s business. John also acknowledged that Mary “may have and exercise any business or trade as a Sole and Separate dealer in buying selling bartering exchanging and retailing all kind of goods . . . whatsoever in Charles Town or else where and in such other way or manner she may think fit.”

Two weeks later, in early July 1768, Mary Stevens announced her new venture in the South Carolina Gazette. She identified herself as a “sole trader” who had opened a boarding house at the corner of East Bay Street and Longitude Lane. A short while later, the boarding house expanded and became a fashionable coffee house. When John Stevens became Deputy Postmaster for the province of South Carolina, Mary’s boarding house also became the town’s post office. Following John’s death in 1772, Mary was not a wealthy widow, but her valuable experience as a businesswoman endowed her with more stability and more independence than most married women in this country.