Historical Facts to State Plainly

Any sociological treatment of gender has to begin with the historical record, and the record is plainer than the politeness of much contemporary discussion suggests. Within living memory, women in most Western democracies lacked basic civil and political rights that are now taken for granted. The relevant facts are settled, documentable, and foundational to the subfield. They should be stated without euphemism.

Suffrage. Women did not obtain the vote on equal terms with men until the twentieth century, in most cases the mid-twentieth century or later. The United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, formally extending the franchise to women nationally. Black women in the Jim Crow South were effectively disenfranchised by the same mechanisms that disenfranchised Black men — poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, violence — and were not reliably able to vote across the South before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which for the first time provided sustained federal enforcement of voting rights. Even before 1965, some Black voters managed to exercise the franchise in limited localities and circumstances; but systematic, legally backed suppression meant that meaningful access remained uneven and precarious until federal enforcement mechanisms were in place (Cott 2000, pp. 147-155). The United Kingdom passed the Representation of the People Act in 1918, enfranchising women over 30 who met a property qualification; full equal franchise with men came only in 1928. Switzerland did not grant women the federal vote until 1971, and the half-canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden held out until a 1990 federal court decision forced the issue. Liechtenstein enfranchised women in 1984. These dates are not marginal: they describe the normal state of Western democracies for most of the period in which mass democracy is usually said to have existed.

Coverture. Under English common law, and in the jurisdictions that inherited it, marriage placed women under the legal doctrine of coverture, formulated by Blackstone in his 1765 Commentaries on the Laws of England: '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' (Blackstone 1765, Book 1, Chapter 15). Under coverture, a married woman could not own property in her own name, could not make contracts, could not sue or be sued, and could not retain her own wages. Her husband held legal title to her labor, her earnings, and in substantial measure her person. The historian Amy Dru Stanley has traced how coverture was dismantled only gradually through nineteenth and twentieth century reforms — the Married Women's Property Acts in England (1870, 1882) and in US states (from the 1840s onward), and later statutory changes clarifying wage rights, contract rights, and standing in court (Stanley 1998, pp. 175-218). Reva Siegel's work on the 'rule of thumb' and the law of marital chastisement documents how the formal abolition of a husband's right to correct his wife physically did not translate directly into legal protection from marital violence; the categories of privacy and family harmony absorbed much of what had previously been overt legal authority (Siegel 1996, pp. 2118-2141).

Marital rape. The common law categorically exempted husbands from prosecution for raping their wives, on the theory — articulated by Sir Matthew Hale in the seventeenth century — that marriage constituted irrevocable consent. The exemption was overturned only in the late twentieth century. The United Kingdom eliminated the marital rape exemption by judicial decision in R v R in 1991. In the United States, the exemption was abolished state by state, with North Carolina becoming the last state to fully remove it in 1993 (Hasday 2000, pp. 1373-1379). Germany criminalized marital rape in 1997 after extended legislative debate. In many other jurisdictions, the exemption remains on the books or was removed even later.

Labor, credit, and property. Women's access to the formal labor market, to credit in their own name, and to independent property was legally and practically restricted throughout most of the twentieth century in Western democracies. In the United States, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 was the first federal law that unambiguously prohibited creditors from requiring a husband's signature on a married woman's loan or credit-card application. Goldin's long-run economic history documents that married women's labor force participation in the United States remained below 25% until the 1950s and climbed rapidly only in the second half of the twentieth century (Goldin 1990, pp. 17-39). The legal architecture of women's economic subordination — employment bars for married women, protective labor laws that functioned as exclusions, property regimes that assumed male headship — was transformed, not abolished, within the past sixty years.

These facts are not contested among historians. They are the factual baseline on which any sociological analysis of gender rests. The conceptual work that follows — de Beauvoir, the second wave, intersectionality, the economics of the family — all begins from the recognition that the subordination being analyzed was legal, explicit, and recent.