Feme Sole Traders: Coverture's Second Exception

Feme covert in her husband's home, feme sole in her own shop

The law knows how to make rules and the law knows how to make exceptions. The rules of coverture, which governed married women’s legal rights in England and the United States until the late 1800s, were no different. The rules were that married women could not sign contracts, hold property, or bring legal claims. The rules theoretically applied to every married women. Except that they didn’t.

Last week, I wrote about coverture’s first exception, the Queen. The Queen was, however, only one of several exceptions to the rule. A second exception to the rule was the feme sole trader, the woman who ran her own business and earned money, just like a man. While the first exception demonstrated the exceptionalism of embodied political power, the feme sole trader exception reveals the benefits for women of being proximate to economic power and acting as drivers of capital.

To Be the Queen: Coverture's First Exception

What did a feme sole trader look like?

Take Susanna Passavant. Passavant was born into a Huguenot family of jewelers in the early 1700s, and when she was young her parents arranged for her apprenticeship with George Willdey, who belonged to the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers. In the early 1750s, Passavant opened her own shop, The Plume of Feathers, which was a luxury boutique specializing in jewelry, accessories, and toys.

This on its own was a noteworthy accomplishment. What was even more noteworthy, however, was that when Passavant married, she continued trading - as a feme sole trader - and maintained her successful business without any interference from her husband. Over the years, Passavant’s reputation grew to both national and international proportions, and she exported goods to many high-profile clients including George and Martha Washington.

Images of women in trade, acting as merchants

What do we know about other feme sole traders?

Passavant was not an anomaly. Both in London and other cities with mercantile bases, there were feme sole traders working as cloth and candles merchants, dressmakers, shoemakers, tavern keepers, brewers, and bakers.¹ In eighteenth-century London, at least 165 women registered in guild books as silversmiths, 250 as printers, and an estimated 500 women “traded as millinery proprietors.” Studies of of the census data for England and Wales between 1851 and 1911 have found that “at least 30% of the total number of entrepreneurs, or business proprietors, were female.”²

While guild registries and census data did not track the marital status of the proprietor, feme sole traders could be identified through the court records, if they registered their status, and their business interests could also be tracked through wills. In one familiar business pattern, women inherited businesses from a parent and continued to operate the business while married, without the involvement of the husband. There were also women who were apprenticed - like Susanna Passavant- and built business assets of their own to pass down to their children.

Feme sole traders and other women proprietors made their presence known with trade cards. Amy Louise Erickson, who has studied these cards extensively has called them “the ornately engraved predecessor of the modern business card.”

Business or "trade" cards from feme sole merchants in the eighteenth century

What was the legal authority for this?

The legal authority for feme sole trader status resided in local city customs, so each city regulated the registration of these business women. Once a married woman registered herself as a “feme sole” trader in a local Court of Record, she was able to operate as an independent person.³ Her business had to be entirely distinct from her husband’s, otherwise she would be considered his assistant or agent. Likewise, a husband could not involve himself in a feme sole trader’s business operations. If he did, her status as a feme sole trader could be challenged in court.⁴

A feme covert was a married woman, or a “covered woman.” A feme sole referred to a single woman. Unmarried women, whether they were young and preparing for marriage or older and widowed (divorce was unavailable), had the status of a feme sole. That’s Law French in action.

What was the reason for the feme sole trader exemption?

This exemption and latitude allowed to certain women has the ring of empowerment, and the histories, still being uncovered, signal the incompleteness of the stories we have been told. Scrutinizing the legal justifications for the feme sole trader exception is, however, instructive - and two justifications stand out.

The first and most compelling justification for English lawmakers was that the exception provided a measure of financial protection for husbands and lenders. Once a married woman was a feme sole trader, she could be sued by lenders/creditors as a single women and her husband’s assets were safe if her business failed or went bankrupt.⁵ (This was directly opposite to the outcome under the doctrine of coverture, when the husband would be liable for all of the wife’s debts.) In fact, even when the debt was the husband’s alone, lenders sometimes tried to claim that the wife was a feme sole trader in order to go after the money from a different legal avenue. Bottom line: lenders came out ahead.

Second, feme sole trader status was a way for the law to enable women to keep and manage their own earnings if and when their husbands were away or abandoned them. These retained earnings acted as a social safety net and kept women from imposing on the public purse. This was an early version of what we call today privatizing the family and the feme sole trader exemption served the purpose of keeping the government out of the business of resourcing families in need.

The feme sole trader exception reveals several truths. That married women were surviving and thriving in multiple forms of trade well before the end of coverture. That women with parental wealth, who inherited businesses or secured apprenticeships like Passavant, benefitted from rights and opportunities that other women did not have. And that the law tolerated the expansion of rights for certain married women because it served the financial needs of capital and the State.

At the end of the day, Susanna Passavant was not given the right to run a successful business on account of her talent or a legal desire to encourage women. Passavant was accorded legal rights in order to minimize her husband’s liability, open her business assets to creditor claims, and keep her resourced in case her husband did not fulfill his marital obligation to support her. Legal rights for married women were co-extensive with expanded support for the capital that drove markets.

Question: Was the feme sole trader the original "girl boss" — celebrated for her independence and economic power, while the legal architecture around her operated to serve patriarchal power. Sound familiar?

Do you know someone who would like to read more about coverture? Recommendations, likes, and shares are absolutely always appreciated!

1. You might want to check out this great post from Lucy Writes History about Catherine Tuggy’s Plant Nursery in the 1630s.

2. Amy Louise Erickson, Wealthy businesswomen, marriage and succession in eighteenth-century London, Business History, 66(1), 29–58 (2024). Erickson is one of the most prominent scholars writing about this topic.

3. This custom was codified in the White Book (Liber Albus), a seminal document from the fifteenth century of London’s civic charters, customs, laws, and history as recorded by a town clerk.

4. Karen Pearlston, What a Feme Sole Trader Could Not Do: Lord Mansfield on the Limits of a Married Woman’s Commercial Freedom, in Kim Kippen and Lori Woods (eds), Worth and Repute: Valuing Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe 309-24 (Toronto, 2010).

5. Karen Pearlston, Married Women Bankrupts in the Age of Coverture. 34 Law & Social Inquiry 265 (2009).