Law

...What did women need of the law? Firstly, they needed the right to freely inhabit their bodies, to use their minds and follow their consciences. They needed spousal laws which required their consent to a marriage. They needed rights of access to mother their children. And they needed maintenance of inheritance and dowry rights. The right to enter professions would have been a dream.

What did women get from the law? Only in cases of extreme brutalisation would it intervene; women could be "chastised" by their husbands for disagreeing or displeasing and the controversy about the extent to which a man could beat his wife even featured as an Oxford debate in 1608. In religion a woman was to follow her husband's teaching, and conversion to Catholicism or doubt of the literalness of the virgin birth were grounds for condemnation and turning out of doors. While spousal laws required a woman's consent, how the consent was achieved was effectively left to the woman's male relative or guardian. Once a woman was married, her husband could try to obtain financial benefit from any right she might have, inducing her by pressures such as taking her children from her to sign away her right in his favour. Complicated exchanges were attempted, offering a wife a present benefit in a form controlled by her husband, in exchange for a future dower (one third of the estate in her lifetime) benefit to be used after his death. The point was that the woman had virtually no protection from her husband, and her resistance in maintaining her legal rights had to be made against him. The law, for all its aims and fine sentences, was not much use to women. Because the law could not materially affect the attitudes within society, it did not redress the problems of women effectively....

... Note the serious inconsistency in the men's treatment of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. On the one hand, they spoke in terms which assumed that her consent was a part of the transaction of marriage, as indeed it was supposed to be in law. On the other hand, their acceptance of the Prince doing the wooing, disguised as Claudio, inherently accepted that her consent would be based on a very flimsy experience indeed. Was Don Pedro that much better at wooing than Claudio himself? His amorous tale would be fiction if she her interest were transferred to another man. Hero's ability to chose her loving seemed non-existent to the men. Desirable as she was, in this she was little better than a sort of prized heifer standing doe-eyed in the enclosure of their transaction....