The ideas about women that took hold into his century subordinated women in mutually reinforcing ways. Perhaps the most enduring conceptual basis for women's subordinate legal and social status is the assumption that while men represent the norm of the fully human being, women represent a deviation -- sometimes superior, usually inferior, but always "different." Some explanations of women's inherent difference have focused on the biological, others on the moral, and still others on the economic or social. The perception of women as inherently different has resulted in systematic legal disadvantages for women as compared with men. It has also disadvantaged some groups of women who most closely conform to the expected norms. Women's differences sometimes have been used to gain legal protections. Even these measures, however often contribute to women's subordinate status by narrowing their options and reinforcing their use as scapegoats for society's ills, such as poverty, immortality, and crime.

Another foundation of women's subordinate status is the concept of women as property. Under the legal regime of slavery, slave women's bodies were directly exploited for economic profit. In addition to providing field labor and domestic labor to their white owners, slave women could expect to be sexually exploited; indeed, there was an economic incentive for such exploitation, because the child of a slave woman was legally a slave as well. After slavery was formally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, black women and other women of color were channeled into low-paying personal service jobs that left them without access to training or capital.

A free white women in the eighteenth century who married did not face these depredations, yet she found her legal and economic existence virtually suspended - merged with that of her husband. Until the advent of married women's property acts and earnings statutes in the nineteenth century, the marital unity doctrine meant that a married white woman was incapable, except under certain circumstances recognized at equity, of making contracts or wills, owning property, retaining control of her" separate estate," testifying as a witness in court against her husband, or retaining her own name. Even as equitable principles evolved and statutes were enacted to protect women's economic interests, or the interests of those with whom they or their husbands transacted business, these laws were interpreted in ways that reinforced women's economic dependency on men.

The definition of sexual norms is also a powerful tool of subordination. The sexual exploitation of slaves, the nineteenth century "cult of motherhood," control of women's reproduction through bans on birth control and abortion, domestic violence, and the laws against miscegenation, were among the many ways sexual norms were used to establish and reinforce gender subordination which, again, often intersected with race and class subordination.

A foundation for women's subordination which helps to draw together some bases for women's subordination into a coherent whole is the "separate spheres" ideology. This ideology defines a male sphere that is "public" -- one concerned with the regulated world of government, trade, business, and law, from which women long were largely excluded. Women did not win the vote in the United States until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, after a long and hard-fought battle and well after male former slaves were enfranchised at the end of the Civil War. Even after suffrage, women were routinely excluded from serving on juries well into the 1960's. Women's participation in the military has traditionally been limited to auxiliary positions, secure from the opportunities for glory, if not from danger. Since traditionally a public role was not contemplated for women, they were systematically discouraged from obtaining higher education, from joining the professions, and from running businesses except as helpmates to their husbands.

The separate spheres ideology also defined a "private" sphere, encompassing the unregulated realm of home, family, and child-rearing. Women attained what status they had through the legally sanctioned family, and without it, they could expect economic hardship, pity, and suspicion. Yet it was woman's "place" in the private sphere that justified her exclusion form the public sphere, and under the marital unity doctrine, her husband retained ultimate authority over her even in that domain. The separate spheres ideology not only rationalized women's exclusion form political and economic self-rule and their assignment to dependent and subservient roles; it also helped to obscure that subordination by defining women's confinement to matters of home and family as "natural." In addition, it obscured distinctions between women based on race and class. For example, some family lives were made possible by domestic servants, who spent their working lives caring for other women's husbands and children at the expense of their own.

Many of the primary sources contained in this [unit] are, strictly speaking, out of date. Blackstone's Commentaries (which, even in its time, exaggerated and thereby reinforced women's legal subordination) no longer accurately describes the status of married women under common law; de jure slavery in the United States has been abolished; and most of the appellate cases set forth in the [unit] have been overruled, either by legislation or by subsequent judicial opinion. The purpose of these materials is not to present a full picture of woman's legal position at any particular time, past or present. Rather, the objective is to illustrate a partial range of the rationales and ideologies that helped to shape the historical context from which the doctrines and theories examined in the rest of the book emerged.