Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Bride
June, the month named for Juno, the Roman goddess of childbirth and fertility, is typically considered a romantic month for brides. The origin of the word “bride” itself is less romantic, although of uncertain and debatable origin. It refers to a newly married woman, is thought to have been borrowed from the Medieval Latin root “bru,” which means cook or brew. Domestic duties were typically the new wife’s job. This remains true in Japan (and possibly households all over the world, including the U.S.), where despite some gender equality, wives are expected to perform the full-time household chores of cooking, laundry and cleaning even when they have professional occupations. The Japanese word for wife “oku-san,” means “person in the back.”
Another ancient word for bride translates literally as “house-gift,” relating back to early views of wives as chattel or personal property. “Chattel” is an old French word for cattle, derived from the Latin root meaning goods, wealth or property, which includes valuable livestock. Today in poor nations like South Sudan, child brides continue to be commodities sold for cattle. Part of America’s Colonial heritage is that women were considered the property of men under law. Married women could not own property, since they themselves were property. If it sounds like ancient history, look up the word “coverture,” a set of laws that state a married woman’s identity is “covered” by her husband’s. Under the law of coverture, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed by her husband’s when she got married. While this meant the husband could be held responsible and punished for his wife’s criminal acts, it also meant that females had no legal identity, were not able to own property or had rights to their children. Females were covered by their father’s identity at birth and by their husband’s when they married. Adopting the husband’s last name symbolically affirmed this. The legacy of coverture is why women weren’t regularly allowed on juries until the 1960s in the United States. It wasn’t until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 that financial institutions allowed married women credit cards or loans in their own name. Single women, despite their financial status, were denied credit cards, loans and mortgages. Coverture is no longer a doctrine, but its long shadow continues to exist for women in tax matters and real estate transactions.
