AMERICA 250
As I indicated yesterday, I’ll be mulling, penning, screeding, praising, and brick-batting this altogether weird-assed nation as we approach its b-day No. 250. Yep, this nation, where the vast majority of us were born into it, quite randomly, through no choice of our own. Yet, the majority of that majority thinks people who actually want to live here, who make the choice to get here, who pick up and move across thousands of miles and rivers and oceans are somehow are less worthy of being here than those of us who, through the roll of the dice, were born here. Weird, huh?
We are a nation of contradictions.
Keep in mind I’m not going to uniformly slam the United States of America, nor will I cheerlead for it. We’ve done great things. And we’ve done fucked up things. I’m interested only in our highlights and lowlights, of which there’ve been scads of each.
Yesterday I started this series with Contradiction No. 1 and Contradiction No. 2. It’ll be the theme of this thing.
Around about the 1760 and ’70s, sentiment was fast building among the mainly British arrivals on the east coast for independence from the English crown. Britain had recently established the Declaratory Act, saying, essentially, that the King (or Queen) of England reigned supreme over the 13 Colonies. Britain then followed up with the Townsend Acts, a series of punitive taxes, apparently designed to remind the colonists who was boss. The colonists started to scream to high heaven over these taxes which, really, were the spark that led to independence. Yeah, sure, there were plenty of things to admire about the nascent revolutionaries, and I won’t ignore those things, but, push comes to shove, we eventually split away from England over taxes.
That’s a sentiment that remains with us to this very day. For more than two and a half centuries, “Taxation is theft” has been the shriek of free market fetishists, self-made man fabulists, capitalism genuflectors, Ayn Rand objectivists, and a healthy portion of MAGA cultists.
Anyway, today’s Lowlight is yet another example of our nation’s contradictory nature. Just as the emerging rebels were hollering about the Declaratory and Townsend acts, saying, in essence, screw you England, we don’t need ya, the colonies gleefully adopted one of Britain’s most regressive, antediluvian laws.
Contradiction No. 3: The colonies adopt Britain’s “Coverture” laws. Under British common law, married women…, well, didn’t really exist. English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish wives, at the time and for many years before that, could not own land or property, could not keep their own wages, could not draft wills, could not enter into contracts, and actually could not have any other identity than that of their husbands’. They were, in essence, the legal equivalent of a man’s acreage, his plow, his goat, his musket, or his hat. “Coverture,” writes historian Catherine Allgor, “held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s.”
Those damned Englishmen, the colonists figured, might have been tyrannical tax imposers, but they weren’t all bad, were they? They sure as hell knew how to keep their womenfolk in line.
The whole notion of coverture started unravelling in the mid-19th century, although quite a few states in this country still did not allow individual women to own homes or get credit cards well into the 1960s and even the ’70s.
Both Great Britain and the United States eventually came around to granting females the right to vote, women’s suffrage becoming the law in the former beginning in 1918 and the latter in 1920.
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