Trick Mirror

by Jia Tolentino

Historically, marriage has mostly been bad for women and fantastic for men. Confucius defined a wife as “someone who submits to another.” Assyrian law declared, “A man may flog his wife, pluck her hair, strike her and mutilate her ears. There is no guilt.” In early modern Europe, writes Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History, a husband “could force sex upon [his wife], beat her, and imprison her in the family home, while it was she who endowed him with all her worldly goods. The minute he placed that ring upon her finger he controlled any land she brought to the marriage and he owned outright all her movable property as well as any income she later earned.” The legal doctrine of coverture, which held that, as Sir William Blackstone put it in 1753, “the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage or at least is incorporated or consolidated into that of her husband,” was implemented in the Middle Ages and was not fully dismantled in America until the late twentieth century. Until 1974, women were frequently required to bring their husbands with them while applying for a credit card. Until the eighties, legal codes in many states specified that husbands could not be held responsible for raping their wives.