Lawes Resolutions of Womens Right, The.
[Legal issues]. [Dodderidge, John?] The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights. Or, The Lawes Provision for Woemen. London: Printed by the assignment of John More, Esquire, and are to be sold by John Grove, 1632.
Small 4to.; contemporary calf; later label; initial blank; lightly rubbed; joints frayed; upper panel repaired; some light damp-staining; else a very good tight copy. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of what is now believed to be the earliest known treatise on women’s rights, and the most important book on the legal rights of women in Stuart England, declaring them as, essentially, rightless in opposition to their husbands. Authorship is often attributed to John Dodderidge, despite the fact that the preface is signed “I.L.” and the note to the reader is signed by “T.E.,” who declares the identity of the writer a mystery. The author of the preface describes the contents as comprehensively tackling “all our lawes concerning women, either children in government or nurture of their parents or guardians, mayds, wives and widoes, and their goods, inheritances, and other estates.” STC 7437; Sweet & Maxwell 1, 319; The Galatea Collection, 19; Feminism Is Collectible 104. DNB does not ascribe authorship to Dodderidge, but does include among his posthumously published works a textbook for law students, The Lawyer’s Light (1629), and The English Lawyer (1631). Ironically, Dodderidge was himself thrice married.
A note on the title page describes the content of “The Womans Lawier” (as the book is titled at the opening of the text), as “A Methodicall Collection of Such Statutes and Customes, with the Cases, Opinions, Arguments and points of Learning in the Law, as doe properly concerne Woemen.” A table at the front of the text indexes the volume by subject, though nearly all touch on marriage directly or indirectly in investigating a woman’s rights—or lack thereof—in its regard. A few such topics include Statutes Concerning Marriage, Dower, Elopement (a woman thereby loseth Dower), Impediments of Marriage, Polygamie (forbidden), Promises of Marriage, Rape, Frank-Marriage, Wooing (when the gifts shall be restored, if the match take not effect), and Women: Why In Subjection.
Doris May Stenton writes that “The Lawes Resolutions… makes grim reading, for over and over again the point is driven home that against her husband a wife is almost rightless,” but feels that “the fact that even lawyers could be concerned at the legal inequality between the sexes is at any rate a sign of changing times” (The English Woman in History, 1957). An even more optimistic Rosemary Trask notes that while The Lawes Resolutions does outline the rights of women as stringently limited in point of law, in practice their rights during this period had been greatly enlarged. A study of wills and property inventories of women at that period suggests that many women had a good deal of control over their property:
The difficulties surrounding female inheritance of estates have been noticed in Pearl Hogrefe’s “Legal Rights of Tudor Women and Their Circumvention” in Sixteenth Century Journal (1972). T.E.’s The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632) and Baron and Feme: A Treatise of Law and Equity concerning Husbands and Wives (1700) may have stated what was fact in law, but reality was often quite different. Though women were subject to their husbands, the examples of those who managed their own affairs tempt one to think of them as more than exceptions. Women did leave property in wills more frequently than in the middle ages. Both the amount of property left to them and by them is considerable. Wives could act as executrices of wills, but to what extent they did so or how successful they were remains unknown. (“Age of Transition: 1485-1814” in The Women of England, Kanner ed., p. 143)
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