Abstract
Magna Carta proclaimed freemen could be imprisoned only by the law of the land. Husbands employed Blackstone’s coverture rule to capture ‘errant’ wives. Yet as Scutt explains, Magna Carta worked for women: in 1891 habeas corpus freed Emily Jackson from her husband. Judges said she could leave him, and he could not imprison her. Yet Caroline Norton found habeas corpus could not release her children from a brutal husband’s control. Nor, for centuries, did courts challenge Hale’s infamous dictum that consent to marriage denies wives the right not to be raped. But 100 years after Jackson went free, over 750 years after Magna Carta, courts declared Hale wrong. Runnymede’s barons and King John notwithstanding, Magna Carta’s principle has made women’s bodies (in this regard) at last their own.
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Notes
Bibbings, Binding Men, 2014.
See Scutt, ‘Consent in Rape’, 1977
Holt, Magna Carta, 2015, p. 34;
Beloff, ‘Magna Carta’, 2015, p. 6.
See Sharpe and McMahon, The Persons Case, 2007
Edwards, Sex and Gender, 1996, 2013.
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© 2016 Jocelynne A. Scutt
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Scutt, J.A. (2016). Bring Up the Bodies. In: Women and Magna Carta: A Treaty for Rights or Wrongs?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137562357_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137562357_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-85071-6
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