Definition
An archaic Law French variant spelling of FEME (also written femme, fam). In historical legal sources, fem denotes a woman or, more specifically, a wife. The term appears frequently in Coke and other early common law writers as part of compound legal phrases governing the status and legal capacity of women, most notably feme covert and feme sole.
Fem is not an independent legal concept but a spelling variant that researchers will encounter when working with early English legal texts, Year Books, and American treatises that draw on that tradition.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A synonym of femme; a feminine or effeminate person.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Not separately entered; femme and feme were understood as French-derived words for woman.
The modern colloquial use of fem as a descriptor of gender presentation has no connection to the legal term. In legal sources, fem refers exclusively to a woman in her legal status as wife or as an independent person, and carries with it the entire apparatus of coverture doctrine. A researcher encountering fem in a digitized legal text is almost certainly reading a spelling variant of the Law French feme, not a term carrying any modern social meaning.
Common Confusion
Fem, feme, femme, and fam appear interchangeably across historical sources. Burrill explicitly groups all four forms under a single entry. Researchers using full-text search in historical corpora should run queries for all variants, as OCR transcription of older legal texts frequently produces inconsistent results across the same document. None of these forms should be confused with the Latin femina, which appears in different textual contexts and was not itself a term of art in English common law pleading.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of recognizing fem is navigational: it is a spelling variant that indexes into the larger body of doctrine governing women's legal status under the common law. A researcher who searches only for feme or femme will miss passages where Coke or a compiler using his style wrote fem.
Historically significant compound terms built on this root — feme covert, feme sole, feme sole trader — encode some of the most consequential rules of the common law: a married woman's legal identity was merged into her husband's under coverture, while a feme sole retained independent legal capacity. American reception of this doctrine varied by state, and statutory reforms beginning in the mid-nineteenth century (married women's property acts) gradually dismantled coverture without always retiring the terminology. Sources from the period 1840–1900 may use fem/feme in contexts where the underlying doctrine has already been partially abrogated by statute, creating interpretive traps.
Burrill's citation to the New York Revised Statutes and Michigan Compiled Laws alongside the Missouri Reports in this entry signals that the term was still appearing in mid-nineteenth-century American legal writing, even as legislative reform was underway. Researchers working in that transitional period should verify which elements of coverture remained operative in the relevant jurisdiction and year.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats fem as a direct spelling variant, grouping it with feme, femme, and fam under a unified entry. Burrill quotes Littleton (sect. 665) for the marriage formula and restates the foundational maxim of coverture — le baron et la feme sont forsque come une person en ley (the husband and wife are but as one person in law) — as the doctrinal core. The grouping of spelling variants reflects standard practice in Law French lexicography; these were orthographically unstable forms in manuscript and early print sources.
Historical dictionaries generally agree that all four spellings (fem, feme, femme, fam) are functionally identical and derive from Latin femina by way of Old French. What historical sources do not address is the OCR and search-retrieval problem this variation creates for modern corpus researchers, which is now a practical concern that supersedes the purely definitional one.
Jurisdictional Note
Coverture doctrine, to which this term is functionally connected, was received throughout the American states from English common law but modified at different rates and through different mechanisms by state legislatures from roughly 1839 onward. The term fem/feme itself carries no independent jurisdictional variation; the doctrine it describes does.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: FEME; COVERTURE; FEME COVERT; FEME SOLE