Page:Annie Besant, Marriage A Plea for Reform, second edition 1882.djvu/14

 to show that a married woman is deprived of these rights by the mere fact of her marriage.

In the first place, by marriage a woman loses her legal existence; the law does not recognize her, excepting in some few cases, when it becomes conscious of her existence in order to punish her for some crime or misdemeanour. Blackstone says—and no subsequent legislation has in any way modified his dictum: "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 or consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme couvert" (p. 442). "Husband and wife are one person in law" (Comyn's Digest, 5th ed., vol. ii, p. 208), and from this it follows that "by no conveyance at the common law could the husband give an estate to his wife;" that "a husband cannot covenant or contract with his wife," even for her own advantage, and that any prenuptial contract made with her as to money she shall enjoy for her separate use after marriage, becomes void as soon as she is married. All covenants for the wife's benefit must be made with some one else, and the husband must covenant with some other man or unmarried woman who acts as trustee for the wife. This is the fundamental wrong from which all the others flow: Husband and wife are one person,' and that one is the husband." The wife's body, her reputation, are no longer her own. She can gain no legal redress for injury, for the law does not recognize her existence except under cover of her husband's suit. In some cases more modern legislation has so far become conscious of her, as to protect her against her husband, and if this protection separates her from him, it leaves her the more utterly at the mercy of the world.

Various curious results flow, in criminal law, from this supposition that husband and wife are only one person. They are incompetent—except in a few special instances—to give evidence for or against each other in criminal cases; if a woman's husband be one of several defendants indicted together, the woman cannot give evidence either for or against any of them. Where the wife of an accomplice is the only person to confirm her husband's statement, the statement falls to the ground, as, in practice, confirmation thereof is required; in the case of Rex v. Neal (7 C. and P.