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My understanding is, as is commonly said, that women across the Common Law world were historically subjected to a legal regime called coverture.

What was the basis of this, or what was it based on?

Please note that while I am primarily interested in the situation in the common law world, if you are knowledgeable of such matters in other areas of the world and wish to adapt the question so as to offer an answer based on your own jurisdiction of expertise, please by all means do so!

To make it completely clear, I am looking for the historical-legal answer to the question of how jurists have framed this. That is not an opinion or ideologically based question, it is plainly one of historical fact(s).

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    Nothing in this question is even tangentially related to islamic law or civil legal systems, and you have not made a showing how it would be. Just keep the questions narrowly tailored and make a comparison question once you have one of the systems down,. Commented Apr 11 at 16:57
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    @user80346 This isn't a site for writing your PhD thesis or reproducing whole bookshelves worth of literature. It's a Q&A site, and across all of the StackExchange sites a common requirement is that the questions be focused on one particular question and not be open-ended "What is the meaning of life? What does everybody else think the meaning of life is? Do dogs have an opinion, and if not why not?" stuff. The questions you have been posting are each literally the goal of 4-6 years of post graduate study with some of the most advanced minds in the field. Pare it down. Commented Apr 12 at 3:17

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See Sara M. Butler (Professor and King George III Chair in British History; Director, Center for Historical Research), "Femme Sole Status: A Failed Feminist Dream?":

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.

Blackstone said:

... 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.

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