Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

as her brothers did not [see the previous chapter]. In this chap ter, I will be speaking of women who are not in power unless explicitly specified.)

Women and Marriage

Marriage in itself had nearly no effect on a woman’s legal sta tus. If she had been under her father’s authority, she remained there. If she had been sui iuris , she remained so, and her hus band gained no claim over her property. Neither spouse had an obligation to support the other. The situation I have just described was the normal one, but there was a potential major exception. The parties could choose a form of marriage (typi cally, but not necessarily, at the time it was contracted) that would result not just in their being married, but in the woman passing into the manus (literally “hand”) of her new husband. In this case, if her father was alive, her husband essentially took his place. If she had been sui iuris , she returned to essen tially the position of a daughter to her husband. Only he could own property. Anything that did come to her became his. He had personal authority over her, though it seems not to have extended to the right of life and death, even in theory. If her husband died intestate, she could inherit from him as one of his sui heredes (contrast the normal position of wives as described in Chapter 15). Manus seems to have been an early feature of the law, but there is no clear evidence that it was ever a stan dard part of marriage. Whatever the early situation, by the

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