Law as Father: Metaphors of Family in Nineteenth-Century Law

Abstract

Although metaphor is commonly recognized as an important force in public discourse, this article argues that a subtle shift in metaphor is part of what can create the inventional possibilities for legal change. This article focuses on subtle shifts in judicial appeals to coverture, which were an important part of the struggle for nineteenth-century women's rights. Coverture was the concept in which women were legally and politically ''covered'' by the male head of household. This article argues that changes in coverture were enabled through a subtle shift in legal language, where the metaphor of family-as-government came to be replaced by the metaphor of government-as-family. This movement is traced through the case studies of spousal abuse law, child custody law, and juvenile court.There is not one set path for disempowered groups to attain full citizenship in the United States. Struggles over civil and political rights have included violence and nonviolence, deliberative debates and epidictic performance, and legislative and legal advocacy. During the nineteenth century, abolitionists, civil rights activists, and women's rights activists utilized each of these avenues in an attempt to become full citizens, conceiving of a broad understanding of citizenship that extended beyond voting rights to the lived reality of the human experience.Although the nineteenth-century fight for women's rights is often remembered as a fight for suffrage, in the nineteenth century, women's legal rights in the family were often conceptualized as a primary site of struggle.