Such discrepancies between legal theory and material practice are occluded by the black-and-white conception of women’s objectification under coverture, and suggest that we need to rethink women’s historical relation to and control over property in ways that will allow us to account for the gray areas of ownership, while being careful not to romanticize them. “It is not enough,” Carol Rose has argued, for a “property claimant to say simply, ‘It’s mine,” through some act or gesture; in order for the statement to have any force, some relevant world must understand the claim it makes and take that claim seriously.”99 The variety of claims that have been taken seriously by traditional jurisprudence, however, indicate just how complex and ambiguous the legal concept of ownership in fact is. The jurist A. M. Honoré outlines eleven different rights and incidents of ownership, each representing the ground of a potential claim and also a different type of ambiguity inherent in the concept of “owning.”100 Even the right or claim to outright possession, he points out, may not entitle an owner to exclude everyone from her property. Another common incident of ownership, the claim to “use,” contains its own ambiguities as well: it may include the right to management and income or, in a narrower interpretation, only the right to personal use and enjoyment. Ownership may or may not also include or be limited to the right to manage, which itself confers the power to determine access and use. While managerial control and the right to use is certainly not always tied to legal ownership, Honoré points out that sometimes an owner’s rights are even more restricted than those of a manager or tenant.101 The ambiguities inherent in the legal concept of ownership, and in particular those surrounding the right to management or use, may help to clarify the predicament of wives living under coverture. For while the law of coverture ostensibly relegates the housewife to the status of a merely “vicarious” owner, or nonproprietary, custodial manager, formal and informal agreements and disagreements between spouses over property suggest that the woman’s role as keeper could become a site of negotiation and contestation as well.
Early modern domestic ideology, in positioning the housewife as a nonproprietary manager or keeper of marital property, clearly worked to buttress a political economy based on patrilineal property relations and the gendered division of labor that lent it support. Yet the relationship between discipline, law, and political economy is perhaps not as straightforward as the preceding claim implies. For disciplinary regimes, according to Foucault, “do not merely reproduce … the general form of the law or government … they are not univocal,” but rather “define innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability, each of which has its own risks of conflict, of struggles, and of an at least temporary inversion of the power relations.” Unlike juridical regimes, he argues, they do not “obey the law of all or nothing.”102 Taking the contradiction between the housewife’s keeping of household property and the law of coverture as an example, we can see these instabilities and points of confrontation begin to surface. For the housewife’s contrafactual (“as if”) proprietorship over marital property resides in a gray area of ownership somewhere between coverture’s purported “all or nothing” and, as such, harbors innumerable potential sites of conflict.
The implications of female oeconomy, and of the potential disputes that arose from it, extend beyond the bounds of the domestic sphere. For the early modern household, as has often been noted, was considered to be a microcosm of the state; the good order and governance of the former was seen to be necessary to the good order and governance of the latter. The analogy between the household and the state, Foucault argues in his work on the sixteenth-century “art of government,” established a crucial continuity between domestic discipline and political governance.103 This continuity was reinforced by the etymology of the early modern term oeconomy, which centers on the notions of management and governance:
The art of government … is essentially concerned with answering the question of how to introduce economy—that is to say, the correct manner of managing individuals, goods and wealth within the family … how to introduce this meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state…. To govern a state will therefore mean to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behavior of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods.104
Particularly pertinent here is Foucault’s acknowledgment in this essay that the history of disciplinary regimes, including the early modern notion of oeconomy, concerns not only the body, as he had argued in Discipline and Punish,105 but rather a “complex” composed of subjects and objects:
The fact that government concerns things understood in this way, this imbrication of men and things, is I believe readily confirmed by the metaphor which is inevitably invoked in these treatises on government, namely that of a ship. What does it mean to govern a ship? It means to take charge of the sailors, but also of the boat and its cargo…. The same goes for the running of a household…. [W]hat concerns it is the individuals that compose the family, their wealth and prosperity…. To govern, then, means to govern things.106
The significance of this line of argument, for our purposes, is that it locates the early modern notion of oeconomy at the nexus of domestic discipline, statecraft, and political economy. Yet Foucault’s account curiously eclipses the crucial division of labor upon which this notion was grounded. His description of “oeconomy” as a “complex of men and things” makes no mention of women’s role within it; he thereby implicitly suggests that women were but one in the series of “things” that the domestic patriarch governed. The housewife’s role as keeper within this oeconomy, as we have seen, however, became a central focus of disciplinary attention in domestic manuals of the period precisely because it gave women increasing managerial control over the things that entered and (more disturbingly) exited the home.
The gendered division of labor within the home, in creating separate duties for husband and wife, however, necessarily removed the wife from spousal supervision, giving her increasing autonomy over the domestic sphere. Along these lines, Gouge argues: “it is a charge laid upon wives to guide the house: whereby it appeareth that the businesse of the house appertaine, and are most proper to the wife: in which respect she is called the hous-wife: so as therein husbands ought to referre matters to their ordering” (367). As part of the process of redefining the household as a feminine sphere of labor, domestic manuals themselves functioned to supplement the supervisory role they encouraged husbands to renounce. They did so by encouraging wives to supervise or discipline themselves; the husband, Gouge maintains, “ought to be sparing in exacting too much of [his wife], as that obedience which she performeth, may rather come from her owne voluntary disposition, from a free conscience to God-wards, even because god hath placed her in a place of subjection, and from a wive-like love, then from any exaction on her husbands part, and as it were by force” (366). In answering the “many exceptions which were taken” to his sermons by his female parishioners, Gouge mounts a similar argument, asserting that a wife “can have no just cause to complaine of her subjection,” insofar as her duty is voluntary and should be carried out “whether her husband exact it or no” (sigs. ❡3v-❡4r). If we turn this argument on its head, however, it becomes clear that in defining female subjection as a form of freedom, Gouge effectively renders her freedom (at least in theory) a form of subjection, her autonomy a form of obedience. For the wife’s self-discipline as keeper of