Page:The early history of the property of married women.djvu/10

6 it, and a child who severs his connection with it is lost to it altogether. All the larger groups which make up the primitive societies in which the Patriarchal family occurs, are seen to be mere multiplications of it, and to be, in fact, themselves palpably formed on its model.

But, when first we view the Patriarchal family through perfectly trustworthy evidence, it is already in a state of decay. The emancipation or enfranchisement of male children from parental power by the parents' voluntary act, has become a recognised usage, and is one among several practices, which testify a relaxation of the stricter ideas of a more remote antiquity. Confining our attention to women, we find that they have begun to inherit a share of the property of the family concurrently with their male relatives; but their share appears, from several indications, to have been smaller, and they are still controlled, both in the enjoyment of it and in the disposal. Here, however, we come upon the first trace of a distinction which runs through all legal history. Unmarried women, originally in no different position from married women, acquire at first a much higher degree of proprietary independence. The unmarried woman is for life under the guardianship of her male relatives, whose primitive duty was manifestly to prevent her alienating or wasting her possessions, and to secure the ultimate reversion of these possessions to the family to whose domain those possessions had belonged. But the powers of the guardians are undergoing slow dissolution through the two great sapping agencies of jurisprudence, Legal Fictions and Equity. To those who are alive to the permanence of certain legal phenomena there is no more interesting passage in ancient law than that in which the old lawyer Gaius describes the curious forms with which the guardian's powers were transferred to a trustee, whose trust was to exercise them at the pleasure of the ward. Meantime, there can be no reasonable doubt that among the Romans, who alone supply us with a continuous history of this branch of jurisprudence, the great majority of women became by marriage, as all women had originally become, the daughters of their husbands. The family was based, not upon actual relationship, but upon power, and the husband acquired over his wife the same despotic power which the father had over his children. There can be no question that, in strict pursuance of this conception of marriage, all the wife's property passed at first