id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
blj-2299	Kiarsis, Audrey	Coverture: For the Benefit of All Man[kind]	2024	18	.pdf	application/pdf	5429	169	45	189 Id. 188 Id. 56 Brandeis University Law Journal 2023-2024, Volume 11 women’s rights advocate, offer themselves up as an ideal companion to those of Judith Sargent Murray.191 In an 1837 letter addressed to her sister entitled “Legal Disabilities of Women,” Grimké laments and systematically proposes solutions to the numerous laws that existed solely to restrict the rights and legal identities of women.192 The opening lines of this letter echo the sentiments expressed hitherto, There are few things which present greater obstacles to the improvement and elevation of woman to her appropriate sphere of usefulness and duty, than the laws which have been enacted to destroy her independence, and crush her individuality; laws which, although they are framed for her government, she has had no voice in establishing, and which rob her of some of her essential rights.193 Like Murray, Grimké asserts that the distinct lack of equality between women and men is a direct result of laws that have limited the independence and identity of the former.194 That is to say women, given the proper chance through education, are perfectly capable of the self-improvement proposed by Grimké.195 Murray and Grimké wholeheartedly believe women to possess capabilities equal to those of men, though both agree that their sex has been unjustly hindered in this pursuit by the laws and restrictions imposed by the latter. John Stuart Mill, widely considered to be the greatest English-language philosopher of the 19th century,146 wrote on this very subject.147 He, like many during the 18th and 19th centuries, wholeheartedly believed that women belonged in a place of total subjugation and dependence upon men.148 This is especially evident in his 1870 pamphlet entitled The Subjection of Women, where he writes: It had been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well being of both.149 Mill asserts that the state most conducive to the satisfaction of men and women alike is the latter’s complete dependence upon, and allegiance to, the former.	cache/blj-2299.pdf	txt/blj-2299.txt