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." *
* Blackstone.
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.
Some of the provisions of these laws have, of late years, been modified by the efforts of men who were pronounced "infidels, destroyers of the Bible, the home, and the dignity of women," aided by women whom the orthodox deride as "strong—minded, ill-balanced, coarse, impious," etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam. A strong mind, whether in man or woman, has always been to the clergy as a red rag to a bull.
"A woman may make a will, with the assent of her husband, by way of appointment of her personal property. She cannot even with his consent devise lands.... Although our law in general considers a man and wife as one person, yet there are some instances where she is considered separately as his inferior," and for that trip only.
As I remarked before when it comes to penalties she is welcome to the whole lot.