Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies

FRIDAY & SATURDAY, MAY 6 – 7, 2022, 08:30 A.M. EST

The 2022 Conference on Coverture will be held May 6-7, 2022, and is sponsored by UF Levin College of Law, UF Law’s Center for Governmental Responsibility, the Center for European Studies at the University of Florida, and the UF Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research.

Please register here.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

FRIDAY MAY 6, 2022

• 8:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | Ustler Hall | Continental Breakfast

• 9:00 a.m. | Welcome and Introductions

• 9:15 a.m. – 10:35 a.m. | Panel 1: The Social and Legal Constructions of Coverture
  • Cordelia Beattie – ‘I was much surprised to hear this sad news’: Alice Thornton and Coverture in Seventeenth-century England
  • Gwen Seabourne – Coverture and the medieval common law: patterns, gaps and puzzles in the weaving of the blanket
  • Holly Brewer – Transformations of Domestic Law (Redux): the Expansion of Coverture

• 10:45 a.m. – 12:05 a.m. | Panel 2: Women in the Courts
  • Sara Butler – Marriage and Malicious Prosecution in Late Medieval England
  • Rebecca Mason – Family conflict, legal strategies, and married women’s litigation in early modern Scotland
  • Stephanie Brown – Feme Uncovered: Coverture and Crime in Late Medieval England
  • Krista Kesselring – From the Law-full to the Lawless: Women in the Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart Court of Star Chamber

• 12:05 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Ustler Hall Courtyard | Lunch

• 1:00 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. | Panel 3: Marital Breakdown
  • Amy Froide – Coverture and its Relationship to Marital Separations in Early Modern London
  • Tim Stretton – Combatting Marital Violence in England, 1500-1750
  • Emily Rhodes – ‘As man and wife ought to doe’: Unauthorized Marital Separation in Late Seventeenth-Century England

• 2:30 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. | Panel 4: Married Women and Religion
  • Susan Cogan – “Catholic Wives, Coverture, and Citizenship in Early Modern England”
  • Maebh Harding – Article 41, Catholic Teachings and the Ossification of Victorian Family Power Structures in Irish Law

• 4:00 p.m. – 5:20 p.m. | Panel 5: Married Women and Culture
  • Susan Amussen – Gender and Racial Order on the late 17th century English stage
  • Loreen Giese
  • Allison Tait – The Curiously Female Household: Forming Families in the Shadow of Coverture

SATURDAY MAY 7, 2022

• 8:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. | Ustler Hall | Continental Breakfast

• 9:00 a.m. – 10:20 a.m. | Panel 6: Wives and Wealth
  • Cathryn Spence – ‘Given up by herself’: Wives and wills in early modern Scotland
  • Carla Spivack – Coverture After Death: How Inheritance Law Robs Women of Financial Self Determination
  • Amy Erickson – Coverture and the labour market in England, 1690-1851 or Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in 18th-century London

• 10:30 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. | Panel 7: Wives and The Economic Sphere
  • Emily Ireland – Who suffered under the South Sea Sufferers Bill 1721? Feme Coverts and parliamentary petitions in the wake of the South Sea bubble
  • Danaya Wright – The Liminal Status of Married Femes Sole
  • Mary Beth Combs – The 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and the Marriage Patterns of Nineteenth Century British Shopkeepers

• 11:50 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Ustler Hall Courtyard | Lunch

• 1:00 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. | Panel 8: Women and Empire
  • Phillip Emanuel – My Lady beginns now to sollicit hard’: Wives and the making of the imperial state
  • Brian Connolly – Sovereignty, Marriage, and the Intimate Sphere
  • Elizabeth Bowyer – Coverture and Married Women’s Contracting in Settler Colonial Societies: New Zealand 1840-1920

• 2:30 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. | Panel 9: Marital Unity, Children, and Law Reform
  • Taylor Starr – External Advocacy for Legal Reform: Genesis of Ontario Family Law, 1918-1964
  • Josh Blecher-Cohen – Habeas Corpus for Child Custody in Nineteenth-Century American Legal Thought
  • Laura Rosenbury – The New Parental Rights

The speaker lineup is subject to change.