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Abuse and Ownership, Past and Present

Abuse and Ownership, Past and Present

Last updated on: February 3, 2026 at 5:32 am by Lynneth Renberg

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Abuse and Ownership, Past and Present 2026-02-03T05:32:34-04:00 Lynneth Renberg

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“Countries have to have ownership and you defend ownership, you don’t defend leases.” (Mr. Trump as quoted in BBC Article from January 9, 2026)

“When asked why he needed to possess the territory, [Mr. Trump] said: ‘Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document’.” (“Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’,” New York Times, January 10, 2026)

The news recently has been a lot to keep up with, I know. But in the midst of everything going on, both within the US and internationally, I can’t quite stop thinking about these comments. It seems I’m not the only one, either. When even People Magazine, not exactly known as a hard hitting news outlet for politics, runs an article on these comments, it is clear they’ve made quite a stir.

Some commentaries, like this one from the Arctic Institute, a non-profit organization focused on Arctic geopolitics and security, have emphasized the way that this language connects back to an older vision of the world, one centered on “great powers” and empires:

*“*The argument is that the US should decide what happens in its immediate vicinity, in the same way that Russia wants to control what happens in Estonia, Ukraine and Moldova, and China in Vietnam, Mongolia and Taiwan. This is 19th century great power politics: the most powerful gets to rule in its immediate vicinity, and international rules are primarily about limiting other great powers, not about protecting universal principles or the sovereignty of small states.” (Andreas Østhagen, “Trump & Greenland: Is There Logic in the Chaos?”, Arctic Institute, January 8, 2026)

Those with expertise in the history of 19th-century imperialism certainly have much to say here, as do political scientists. But I am primarily a historian of medieval and early modern Europe, and what came first to mind for me when I read this quote wasn’t a modern empire, but medieval law. More specifically, when I read this assertion that one could not properly care or protect something without ownership, I thought about coverture.

Coverture, Ownership, and Protection

Coverture isn’t a framework that explicitly shows up often in TV shows or movies about the Middle Ages, but it’s in the background of any historically accurate depiction of society from around the 1200s to the 1970s, and even in the background of today’s processes for mortgages and banking.

Medieval legal historian Sara Butler gives a clear definition of coverture when it first emerged in the thirteenth century in English common law on her blog Legal History Miscellany:

“Inspired by scripture (Mark 10:8, “and the two will become one flesh”), for much of England’s history the law understood marriage as creating a unity of person. Once married, a wife’s legal personality merged into her husband’s: the couple became one person at law, represented in the person of the husband. The term “coverture” derives from the legal description of that unification process: a wife was deemed “covered” (protected) by her husband, thus coverte de baron – the use of the term “baron” in this instance was, of course, a recognition of the “natural” hierarchy that existed between husband and wife.”

So, the legal practice had its roots in a specific understanding of scripture, which took “the two will become one flesh” to mean that the two would also become one singular legal person. The husband became the only legally recognized person in the marriage. Technically, he did not own his wife– just everything belonging to him and to her and to anyone in their household. And while medieval women could often find loopholes as a femme sole, those loopholes (rare to begin with) tightened and then closed the longer coverture existed as legal precedent.

Moving into the early modern period, the legal idea of coverture became more and more consistently applied, both in Britain and in its colonies, including the United States. As Catherine Allgor explains in an article for the National Women’s History Museum, coverture in the United States grew out of this medieval English framework:

“Coverture is a long-standing legal practice that is part of our colonial heritage. Though Spanish and French versions of coverture existed in the new world, United States coverture is based in English law. Coverture held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s. The husband and wife became one–and that one was the husband. As a symbol of this subsuming of identity, women took the last names of their husbands. They were “feme coverts,” covered women. Because they did not legally exist, married women could not make contracts or be sued, so they could not own or work in businesses. Married women owned nothing, not even the clothes on their backs. They had no rights to their children, so that if a wife divorced or left a husband, she would not see her children again.”

If we define personhood as including legal recognition of one as an individual, women did not exist as people in the eyes of the law. They had no legal rights or legal identity of their own.

While the religious ideas that had motivated the original legal framework still applied, ideas about coverture as protection had become increasingly common. The writings of William Blackstone, an English lawyer who wrote about marriage in Book 1, Chapter 15 of his Commentaries on English Law (1765-1769), reflected this shift and shaped approaches to coverture in the nineteenth century. Blackstone starts by noting that while marriage is a holy estate, it is regulated by civil law– explicitly separating marriage law from the religious frameworks that shaped the initial practice of coverture and aligning it with all other civil contracts. He then defines coverture as follows:

“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: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” (Book 1, Ch. 15.8)

Note the emphasis on the idea of protection here: the point of the legal doctrine as articulated here is not to reflect a biblical unity, but to “protect” the woman by literally incorporating her into her husband, subsuming her under his identity. A ramification of this is that, as Blackstone says in the next clause, “a man cannot grant anything to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence.” (Book 1, Ch. 15.9) Blackstone goes on to nuance this definition as far as it applies to debts, lawsuits, ecclesiastical law, criminal law, civil law, and corporal punishment. He concludes with the following observation: “even the disabilities, which the wife lies under, are for the most part intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England.” So goes the legal logic: a man had to own everything in his household to be able to protect it, including his wife and daughter. But how did this play out?Does ownership actually mean greater protection and care?

Coverture and Abuse

One way to answer this question is perhaps to look at instances where women are attacked or assaulted in the early modern period. Under Blackstone’s logic, ownership would mean any attacks on a woman would be felt as attacks on one’s own person; if this logic worked, coverture and its ramifications should have helped provide greater protection for women. But looking at sexual assault cases in early modern England shows that this simply isn’t the reality.

All too often, women who were assaulted (despite being “covered” by their husbands or fathers) were blamed for their own assault and punished for “sexual promiscuity,” while those who assaulted them walked away. Cristine M. Varholy’s study of sexual assault cases in early modern London points out that the courts hold women responsible for all sexual activity involving their bodies, including in cases of assault; the legal record reflects not advocacy for and protection of women, but blaming of women. Despite what Varholy refers to as “strong moral and legal rhetoric denouncing rape” (p. 46) there remains, as Barbara J. Baines notes, “a great disparity between the text of the law and legal practice, that is to say, between the severity of the laws and the will to apply them” (Barbara Baines, Representing Rape in the English Early Modern Period, p. 2). Women attempting to protect themselves from charges of extramarital sexual activity, or to obtain justice for assault, had to work against the assumption that women were always complicit in sex. Pastourelles, scripture translations, and court cases from this period all suggest that only rape in an isolated setting counted as an assault, whereas victims of urban rape were equally responsible for their assault as the attacker.

In short, being legally viewed as one person did not make early modern men defend their wives or daughters like themselves; being “under the wing” of another legally simply created new ways to justify blaming the victim (early modern discourse that tries to suggest that being out of your house means assault is your fault is one example of this). And because these victimized women were not considered legal persons in the eyes of the law, when restitution was owed, it was paid to their fathers or husbands, who received the fines that might be collected because of damage to their “property.” If anyone was protected by coverture, it was the men who received all of the benefits of their wives’ or daughters’ property and bodies– not usually (if ever) the women the doctrine claimed it protected.

Ownership and Abuse

As some of you are likely already thinking, coverture is not the only or most egregious historical example of claiming “ownership” of another person. White women under coverture were still legally human, even if their legal rights to ownership, independence, and treatment as an individual were limited or nonexistent. Enslaved persons, though, were considered property rather than humans– and women, who on the one hand suffered a lack of legal status, often participated in enslaving and abusing Black persons. As historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers argues in They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, it is an understatement to say that White women simply participated in the systems of chattel slavery: under coverture, White women still often inherited enslaved persons and attained their own financial means through the sale of these individuals. Economist Trevor Logan puts it bluntly: “slavery was unique in economically empowering women. It was, in essence, an early feminist institution – but exclusively for white women.” The interplay between race and gender here highlights that in practice, the application of coverture was far messier than described here, with more loopholes and conflicting legal ideas shaping individual application of the law.

The ideas that grounded coverture and chattel slavery, and later the imperial structures of the nineteenth century, all fit within the same vision of the world, however: one in which a white, male head-of-family owned everything (and everyone) within his household, in the name of family governance. A common thread connecting these systems of injustice– imperialism, chattel slavery, and coverture– is the idea of ownership, the idea that you can best protect people through ownership and possession. It’s the resurgence of this idea in the recent comments from the U.S. president (and in recent commentary about women and voting from other U.S. government officials) that should give all of us significant alarm. At least if we look at the patterns of the past, systems of legal ownership, in which one person (or group) possesses others do not allow for better care and protection, but for abuse and exploitation. True protection has historically come through recognition of personhood and respect for the autonomy of others– and Christians who read the biblical text carefully, with its consistent emphasis on the rights of widows, immigrants, orphans, and other vulnerable populations, should already know that. We should be shaping our perspectives on both U.S. and international affairs accordingly.

History and Religion

Lynneth Miller Renberg

medieval Christianity

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