Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

is movable property— cattle, wives, concubines, offspring, slaves,beasts of burden, domesticated animals. Chattel property is reckonedas part of a man’s estate. It is wealth and accumulations of itboth are wealth and demonstrate wealth. Chattel property for themost part is animate and sensate, but it is perceived and valued ascommodity. To be chattel, even when human, is to be valued andused as property, as thing.It is fashionable to think that women, who have come a long way,baby, are entirely removed from chattel status. It is fashionable tothink that the chattel status of women is ancient, buried with theold cities of defunct civilizations. But in the United States andEngland, married women were economic chattel through most ofthe nineteenth century. Married women were allowed to ownproperty—which meant that they themselves were consideredpersons, not property—toward the end of the nineteenth century,but that right was made effectual only in the first decades of thetwentieth century. In some states in the United States, marriedwomen still cannot engage in some economic transactions withoutthe consent or participation of their husbands.In the areas of sex and reproduction, the chattel status of womenis preserved in law and in practice. A married woman is obligated toengage in coitus with her husband. He, not she, controls access toher body. With few exceptions, a married woman cannot be rapedby her husband as rape is legally defined, because marriage meansthat the husband has a legal right to coital access. When womenwere clearly and unambiguously sexual chattel, the wife could be“chastised” by her husband at will—whipped, flogged, caned, hit,tied up, locked up—to punish her for real or imagined bad behavioror to improve her character. The bad behavior, then as now, wasoften an attempt to refuse the husband sexual access. The Englishsuffragists thought a new era had arrived when, in 1891, a court setlimits to the force a husband could use against his wife. As SylviaPankhurst recorded:T he Jackson case of 1891, described by the Law Times as “theMarried Woman’s Charter of personal liberty, ” wherein it was