Women as Property (Part 1 of 3)
Jean-Baptiste Greuze (French, 1725–1805), The Village Bride, ca. 1761. Oil on canvas, 120 × 117 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, INV5037. (© RMN-Grand Palais / photo: Franck Raux / Art Resource, NY.). Source
Yes, I know. I could scarcely have chosen a more inflammatory headline. But bear with me. We don’t know where this is going, and the topic has some interesting and important content worthy of understanding.
Thinking about things being “mine”. My car is mine. It is my property, and it belongs to me. I can give it away; I can sell it; I can set it on fire. My house is also mine, in a similar way, although setting it on fire might attract unwanted attention. My job is also mine and it also “belongs” to me. My body is mine, and my mind is also mine. Only I can “make up” my mind, or “change” my mind. My thoughts and feelings are mine too, as are my friends. Other things that are mine are “my mistake”, “my responsibility”, and “my fault”.
My children are also mine; they belong to me; they certainly don’t belong to anyone else. My wife is mine too, and she also “belongs” to me; only rarely am I tempted to set her on fire. But then a wife will claim “This man is my husband”, perhaps with similar sentiments.
There is more. When a mother says “This child is mine”, she is expressing something different than does a father. She has had conception, gestation, birth, lactation, and she is definitely more of a steward of that child than the man, at least in the early years. We can argue that the child, in some sense, is more hers than his, or at least that her concept of “mine” is different than that of her husband.
You can see that each concept of something being “mine”, of “belonging” to me, is different in every case, yet each contains an element of exclusivity. The sense of something being “mine” carries many different meanings, but we cannot express these because the vocabulary doesn’t exist or has been deleted. The result is that words like “mine”, “belonging”, and “property” are forced to carry loads for which they were not designed, and now we cannot express some of our deepest thoughts or feelings.
This problem exists not only with “mine”. In English we say “I am at the shopping mall.” This is a silly expression because it literally means “I exist at the shopping mall”. (One reason I am sometimes tempted to set my wife on fire.) The problem is that English has only one verb “to be”, and it must perform duties for which it was not intended. Italian (Chinese and other languages too) has two verbs “to be”. One is “essere”, literally meaning to be or to exist, and the other is “stare”, which means to be in a certain place or in a certain condition.
If we want to have a discussion about the concept of “mine” and “property” in relation to marriage, children, a spouse (and other items) we will be frustrated because we are unable to articulate the various distinctions. This is something real; a genuine philosophical problem that must be treated seriously. The word “mine” carries multiple distinct meanings, but our modern vocabulary collapses them and denies those distinctions. Because there are different types of ownership/belonging relationships, we need the vocabulary to distinguish them. This is what the classical tradition offered (from the Latin):
– Suum (what is one’s own) – the general term for “mine” that admits of species. The word “suum” is important here – it’s the Latin for “what is one’s own” or “due to us”, and it’s the root of “suum cuique” (to each his own). It’s a broad term that admits of different kinds or species of belonging.
– Dominium: Dominion/property/ownership – This is the “my car” sense. It’s about control, use, disposal, exclusion. It is alienable, transferable, and instrumental. The object exists for the owner’s use. Dominion is the right to use, control, exclude, and dispose. It can be sold, given away, or destroyed, because its relation to the owner is external. The owner is not constituted by the object; he merely possesses it.
– Munus or, more broadly, Officium: Vocation/office/duty – This is the sense of “my job”. It is a set of duties, a station in life, held but not owned in the proprietary sense; it comes with obligations and can be lost. It is about a role with duties and privileges, held for a purpose beyond the holder. I can’t sell my job, though I can resign it; and it is not constitutive in the way that a marriage or a child is. It is a position, not a relation.
– Patria Potestas: Paternal authority/filiation – for parental authority. This is the “my children” sense. The child is “mine” in the sense of being an extension of me, but also entrusted to me, and being my responsibility. It’s about stewardship, and the continuation of the person through the child. But it is deeper than that; the stewardship is only the outer marker. This is closer to what the Romans called “the power of a father”, but with obligations rather than just rights. The terms of parental authority or responsibility ignore several of the intrinsic meanings.
– Coniugium or Vinculum Matrimonii – Marital union/conjugal bond – This is the “my wife” sense, and is the hardest to articulate. It’s not property, not paternal authority, not office. It’s a mutual gift of selves, a covenant, a one-flesh union. The “mine” here is not possessive but relational. It’s the “mine” of “my own body”; I don’t own my body as property, but it is mine in the sense that it is me. The marital “mine” is analogous: it’s the “mine” of mutual belonging, of exclusive self-gift, and in that sense it infringes on the idea of property.
These examples show that “mine” is not one relation but a family of relations. English uses the same possessive grammar for things that are morally and metaphysically very different. A useful way to sort them is by asking: What kind of claim does “mine” make, and what follows from it?
1. Constitutive “mine”:
“My body” and “my mind” are not mine in the way “my car” is mine. They are not external property I can alienate without destroying the self. They are constitutive of who I am. The grammar of possession hides this: “my body” sounds like “my coat”, but the relation is closer to identity. My body is both mine and me, or at least inseparable from me.
“My mind” is similar but more reflexive. I can “make up my mind” and “change my mind.” That is agency: the mind is not just an object I possess but a capacity I exercise. Yet I also do not fully own my mind: thoughts arrive unbidden, feelings arise involuntarily, memories intrude. So “mine” here means attributive and constitutive, not controllable property.
2. Experiential “mine”:
“My thoughts” and “my feelings” are mine in the sense that they are first-person given: I have privileged access to them, and they are attributed to me. But I am not always their author. An intrusive thought is mine without being chosen; a feeling can be mine without being endorsed. So this is a category of ownership without full authorship, or better, attribution without dominion.
3. Relational “mine”:
“My friends” are mine in a reciprocal, non-exclusive way. I do not own them; they are not property, but relational; the relation is mutual and can be shared. “Mine” here marks a social position, a role in a network of commitment and affection, but not a title deed. It expressing belonging, loyalty, or exclusivity of a relational kind, not ownership in the property sense.
4. Custodial/generative “mine”:
This is where the mother/father example is most illuminating. “This child is mine” can express several different things at once: I carried, bore, and nourished this child. This child is part of my flesh, history, and self-understanding. This child is “mine” as someone I hold as precious and non-transferable. I am accountable for this child’s welfare. A mother’s “mine” can differ from that of a father’s in the dimension of embodied gestation and birth. In that dimension, the relation is asymmetrical. The mother has a somatic tie the father does not have.
5. A useful contrast: “my mistake”One more category is worth adding: “my mistake,” “my responsibility,” “my fault.” Here “mine” means accountability. It is not property, not constitution, not relation; it is a normative tie. This shows how far “mine” extends: it can mark things I own, things I am, things I belong to, things I care for, and things I am answerable for. That may be the most important further comment: “mine” is often less about ownership than about answerability.
The general point is that “Mine” is a grammatical container for many different relations:
Kind of "mine" Example What it expresses
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Kind of "mine" Example What it expresses
Constitutive my
body, my mind identity/inseparability
Attributive my thoughts, my feelings first-person attribution
Agency my decision, my choice authorship/responsibility
Relational my friend, my partner reciprocal belonging
Custodial my child, my patient stewardship/responsibility
Proprietary my car, my land alienable ownership
Normative my fault, my duty accountability
The Marriage Relation
The Wedding Register by Edmund Blair Leighton – 1920. Source
The frustration is that we cannot express the legitimate content of “my wife” without sounding like we are claiming a property ownership. The solution is to distinguish union from dominion. Union is not ownership; it’s mutual self-gift. But it is exclusive, and it is a kind of belonging, because the gift is total. There is a real distinction to be made here, but that vocabulary has been lost. This is a genuine and precise problem, and the reason we cannot put it into words is not that the words do not exist. The words have been collapsed into a single term – “property” – and then the single term has been attacked, so that anyone who tries to use it is placed on the defensive before he can say what he means. The vocabulary that once distinguished the different senses of “mine” has been flattened, and the flattening is not accidental. A culture that wants to deny the legitimacy of a relation needs first to deny it the conceptual space in which it could be articulated. This was done, and the doing of it was not accidental.
If we think about marriage, and the relationship of a wife to her husband, the word “property” will be rejected, but there is nothing to replace it. Our modern vocabulary that once distinguished these has been deliberately stripped. The liberal tradition reduces all belonging to property rights, which is why “my wife” sounds like chattel when it shouldn’t. The feminist critique then attacks the property framing but offers nothing to replace it, leaving a man unable to express the legitimate content of his relation to his wife.
Union is the one for which the vocabulary is most thoroughly missing. It is not dominion, because the wife is not a thing to be traded or sold. It is not stewardship, because the relation is in some part symmetrical, even if my wife is a dependent. It is not office, because it is not a role but a bond. The closest analogue in ordinary experience is the “mine” of “my own body”. I do not own my body as property. I cannot sell it, and it is not external to me, but it is mine in the sense that it is constitutive of who I am. The marital “mine” is a mutual, total, exclusive, self-gift that constitutes a new reality. It is exclusive not because the wife is possessed but because the gift, to be what it claims to be, must be total. A gift that can be given to another is not a gift; it is a loan. The “mine” of marriage is the “mine” of a gift that has been given and received in full, and therefore cannot be given elsewhere without being retracted. The “one flesh” concept is actually the key.
Modern history re-stated this as a “covenant”, but this was about the bond, not the belonging, and was too vague. It perhaps captured the mutual self-gift, but not the exclusivity. But then the covenant was replaced with the “contract”, and this is where everything fell apart. More later; we are not done with this.
Prior tradition distinguished at least four species of “mine,” each with its own term and its own logic. The modern vocabulary collapses these multiple meanings into “property”, and the collapse is the source of our difficulty. It then either defends it (conservatives) or attacks it (feminists). Both are wrong because they’re using the wrong category.
A Step Into the Past
Things were different, then. Let us here consider the condition of a man’s relation to his wife in “the good old days”; in this case, England in the 1700s. When we take into account the level of civilisation at the time, and reflect on the fact that society and the family unit were still in developmental transition, we find their solution acceptable if not commendable. Unfortunately, this history has been usurped by the feminists and the holy keepers of the sacred “official narrative”, who have managed once again to take a good thing, misrepresent it, and then trash it.
First, here is the current “official narrative” of the good old days. We are dealing with two terms; Feme Covert, and Coverture:
Feme Covert
A fair in Ghent in the Middle Ages. Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK). Source
“A married woman, as understood within the common law doctrine of coverture. The term designated a woman whose legal identity was, upon marriage, subsumed into that of her husband. A feme covert could not own property in her own name, enter binding contracts, sue or be sued independently, or execute legal instruments without her husband’s participation or consent.” [1] The term “Feme covert”, was from the Anglo-Norman French. It denotes a married woman under coverture’s veil, contrasting with “feme sole” the unmarried woman who was a widow, spinster, or divorcée who retained full legal autonomy akin to a man.
Coverture
From an American legal help library: “Coverture was a common law doctrine that merged a married woman’s legal identity into her husband’s, so that once she married she could no longer own property, sign enforceable contracts, sue or be sued, or make a will in her own name. The meaning of coverture, in short, is legal invisibility by marriage… The clearest statement of coverture comes from William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765. Blackstone wrote that “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.”[2] To emphasise this, an article at Jstor.org titled “Married Women and the Law”, states in part that women remained subordinate at the level of both household and state: “She was, like a slave, an extension of her husband’s household and not a full legal person.” [3]
I have to admit that doesn’t sound very nice. If I were a woman, these conditions alone might transform me into an enraged feminist. But then, things aren’t always what they seem to be. First, the definitions above are selective and misrepresented. One law website does admit that the “disabilities” of the feme covert were not quite “absolute”, that the courts developed ways to sidestep the restrictions. It fairly states that “What the historical dictionaries collectively omit is the equitable dimension; the mechanisms by which courts of equity softened or circumvented the common law rule”.[4] In real life, a married woman was indeed able to own and hold property that was beyond her husband’s reach, and women of the day regularly appeared as litigants before the courts to protect their property rights. Another author confirms that “coverture proved flexible in practice, its rationales adaptable to different contexts”. It was interesting that in 17th century England, a married woman’s personal property (like dishes), and investments (as in chickens and pigs), would be transferred to her husband upon the marriage. But real property like land and buildings remained in her name. I will not try to explain that.
The real issue is that the history of the legal status of women is today described by the official narrative of the feminists as a “designed disempowerment” of women, when in reality it was no such thing. Keep in mind that we are looking hundreds of years into the past and, at this distance, it is not easy for us to put ourselves into the minds of those who lived at the time.
But to begin, the terms of a marriage were designed to reflect the cultural concept of “chivalry”, which was at the time an ideal of major importance, no matter that today we either deny or dismiss it. And chivalry implied protection of “the weaker sex”. This was not intended as a mechanism of male authoritarian control, but reflective of the responsibility of a man to his wife, reflecting in fact the desired attitude of all men to all women. More importantly, the legal structure was grounded in the premise of marital unity – that the man and woman became “one”, and not only in the religious sense. It portrayed the husband as the physical and legal guardian of his wife, something that feminists today dismiss as a legal fiction “known to be false”.
This is the reason that for hundreds of years wives were not able to testify against their husbands, and that spouses could not sue each other: the plaintiff and defendant would be the same person. This is also the origin of the convention of a wife taking her husband’s surname. [5]
Vocabulary: Another Legacy of the Jews
The Babylonian Marriage Market is an 1875 painting by the British painter Edwin Long. It depicts a scene from Herodotus’ Histories of young women being auctioned into marriage in the area then known as Babylon or Assyria. Source
Today, “property” is the only word left. The reason is that the liberal tradition reduced all belonging to dominion, because dominion is the only form of belonging that can be priced, traded, and enforced by contract. This reduction had the effect of making every other form of belonging invisible in the public vocabulary.
The path for this transition begins in a very strange place. We have all heard the stories of the Jews being expelled hundreds of times from dozens of countries, during the past 1,000 or so years. The stories are true;the explanations are false. The Jews were not expelled because of “anti-Semitism” as the official narrative tells us; they were expelled because they were parasites, they were obnoxious, and they were criminals, often savagely so.They were predators.They engaged in usury; they were the world’s primary slave traders and sex traffickers, and were especially hated (and expelled) for their tax farming.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term “tax farming”, here is a brief explanation: Wealthy Jews would approach the monarch with a proposal to give him his entire year’s tax receipts in one lump sum – in cash – at the beginning of a year, in return for permission to function as the realm’s tax collectors for that year, ostensibly to recover their “investment”. Many monarchs complied. So far, so good. But the Jews were greedy. They invented unlimited kinds of new taxes and repeatedly increased all existing taxes until the entire realm was (sometimes literally) facing bankruptcy and (more often literally) a popular revolution. The King, facing a choice between retaining either the Jews or his head, would invariably decide to expel the Jews. There were times when they were permitted to take their ill-gotten bounty with them when they left but, more often than not, all their assets were confiscated on departure. Clearly, something needed to be done.
And this is the background for the loss of our vocabulary today. We might have initially concluded that the condition of these vocabulary difficulties was somehow an accident, the result of poor planning, but in fact it was deliberate.
I wrote above that the liberal tradition reduced all belonging to dominion, because dominion is the only form of belonging that can be priced, traded, and enforced by contract. But “the liberal tradition” is not a person, and it is only real persons who can craft and conduct a change in vocabulary. And changes like this cannot be accidental; they must be made knowingly to create precisely the effects they cause. The reduction of “belonging” to the sole meaning of “dominion” was not a single act, but a series of deliberate choices made by identifiable individuals, each of whom had reasons to prefer a conception of property that was exclusive, absolute – and enforceable. The consequence, the invisibility of other forms of belonging, was foreseeable and, in significant measure, intended.
The decisive figures were John Locke and, a century later, William Blackstone. They were not anonymous “liberals”; they were men with specific purposes. John Locke was not a Jew, at least not to my knowledge, but he was definitely an apologist for the Jews and a defender of them. The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs carries an article titled “The Hebraic Roots of John Locke’s Doctrine”. [6] It posts a comment by a prominent Jewish author that “Locke anchored his thinking on property … exclusively on the Hebrew Bible”. There was also an author who, some time after Locke’s death, wrote an article titled, “The Lamentations of the Children of Israel representing the Hardships they suffer from the Penal Laws”. In it, the author recalled Locke as a “defender of the Jews”. [7]
Locke, in his “Two Treatises of Government”, provided the philosophical foundation for the vocabulary change. His theory of property began with the premise that every man has property “in his own person”, meaning that it is exclusive only to him, and that this “ownership” cannot be violated. The crucial move is that Locke defined property in a way that was pre-political, that supposedly existed before government – and before kings. His argument was specifically directed against any defense of absolute monarchy in property confiscation. Its effect was to establish a model of ownership grounded in “individual dominion”. Locke’s writing was clearly in defense of a propertied class (the Jews)against royal prerogative (confiscation on expulsion), so much so that he effectively claimed this derived private ownership of property was divinely sanctioned. He argued eloquently in favor of the “capitalists”, reducing all ownership to “dominion” in this process, and his reduction was not an accident. Locke needed a conception of property that could be defended (by the Jews) against an arbitrary monarch, and exclusive dominion over things was the most serviceable model for that purpose.
William Blackstone, some years later, in his “Commentaries on the Laws of England”, gave this conception its canonical legal formulation. His definition: property is “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe” (including you, the King). Blackstone did not invent the idea, but he was able to have it codified it as the central trope of English common law. His purpose was very clear: to protect (Jewish) property rights against “feudal king and administrative arbitrariness”. The historian Robert Gordon noted that by the late 1700s, the idea of property as absolute individual dominion had become an ideology in which private property was “sacralised”; i. e., made holy and untouchable by mere monarchs. The changes were not confined to England; this was (by necessity) a European-wide reconstruction of the vocabulary of belonging around a single, enforceable model.
The motives were not hidden. What we refer to today as “liberal theorists” (The Jews and their apologists)were constructing a legal and philosophical framework – primarily for the benefit and protection of the Jews – in which their property had to be alienable, priceable, and defensible in court. A conception of ownership as absolute, exclusive, God-ordained dominion, served this purpose perfectly. It made property legible to the law, transferable in markets, and secure against both monarchical and communal claims. The reduction of belonging to dominion was, in this sense, a functional requirement of the emerging Jews. Of course, the definition applied to all persons, but that was what we might call “collateral damage”, since it wasn’t the intent.
The Canadian political theorist C.B. Macpherson[8] named the result “possessive individualism”, with society itself becoming “a system of exchange between self-proprietors” and the state being “merely an instrument for the protection of property”. To relate this to our specific concern, “Macpherson’s analysis makes explicit what the liberal theorists left implicit”: once the individual is defined as a proprietor of himself, and property is defined as exclusive dominion, and the state exists only to protect that dominion, every other form of belonging – custodial, relational, normative, constitutive – is rendered invisible in the public vocabulary.
The liberal theorists could not have been unaware that they were marginalising other forms of belonging. The evidence is that they actively displaced them. The language of “despotic dominion” and “total exclusion” is not the language of a man who has failed to notice that belonging can take other forms. It is the language of a man who is asserting one form against all others. Blackstone’s formulation was polemical in its very structure: it defined property by what it excluded. The effect that belonging would be publicly intelligible only as dominion, was not a side-effect. It was the point. And the combination of Locke and Blackstone managed to standardise this “property” lexicon across all common law jurisdictions. The success is in the evidence; the confiscation of the Jew’s ill-gotten gains, ceased after this definition was normalised.
Back to the Wife and Marriage
But the change did not stop at the unhelpful legal terminology of marriage. It extended to the relation itself, and it used the same word – “property” – to describe both. The result is that any attempt to say “my wife is mine” is heard as “my wife is my chattel,” and the speaker is placed in the position of defending coverture when what he is trying to describe is union. The word “property” is forced to carry loads for which it was not designed, and the load it cannot carry is the load of mutual self-gift. This is important because union requires exclusivity, and exclusivity requires a vocabulary of belonging. If the only vocabulary available is the dominion, then the legitimate condition of marital exclusivity, becomes unspeakable.
The Latin term that once held these distinctions together was suum – “what is one’s own’. Suum admits of species: a man’s suum includes his property, his office, his children, and his wife, but each in a different mode. The word did not collapse the modes; it held them together while allowing the distinctions to be drawn. The modern vocabulary has lost suum and retained only dominium, and the result is that every relation of belonging is either reduced to property or denied altogether.
My wife is “mine” in the sense of union because the gift she has given me is total, and a total gift is exclusive by its nature. The husband’s honor is bound up with his wife’s fidelity because the gift is the constitution of the marriage, and its retraction is the dissolution of what the marriage is. The gift constitutes a new reality that cannot be divided without being destroyed.
This is why we cannot express our deepest thoughts. The words were deleted on purpose, and the deletion is the most consequential achievement of the re-coding, because it is what makes the campaign self-perpetuating: a generation that cannot name the good it has lost cannot mourn it, and a generation that cannot mourn it cannot recover it.
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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 34 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 150 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chap. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
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NOTES
[1] FEME COVERT
https://thelawmind.com/dictionary/feme-covert
[2] Coverture
[3] Married Women and the Law: Coverture in England and the Common Law World
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32b7jq
[4] FEME COVERT
https://thelawmind.com/dictionary/feme-covert
[5] Coverture Meaning: The Common-Law Doctrine and Its Legacy
[6] The Hebraic Roots of John Locke’s Doctrine
[7] John Locke and the Jews
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/abs/john-locke-and-the-jews/45598AF02399540EBDAD6F031E5C2438
[8] Property
https://book.douban.com/subject/3297064/
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