Definition
An Anglo-French legal term meaning "woman." In legal usage, feme appears almost exclusively as part of compound phrases that defined a woman's legal status and, by extension, her capacity to own property, enter contracts, sue, and be sued. Standing alone, feme simply denotes a woman; its legal significance lies entirely in the phrases it forms.
The principal compounds are:
1. FEME COVERT — A married woman. Under the common law doctrine of coverture, a feme covert's legal identity was subsumed into that of her husband upon marriage. She generally could not hold property in her own name, contract independently, or litigate without her husband's participation. The term "covert" reflects the husband's legal shelter or covering of the wife's legal personality.
2. FEME SOLE — An unmarried woman, including a woman who has never married, a widow, or a divorcée. A feme sole possessed full common law legal capacity: she could own property, enter contracts, and sue or be sued in her own name.
3. FEME SOLE TRADER — A married woman who, by custom or statute, was permitted to carry on trade or business independently of her husband, with the legal capacity of a feme sole for purposes of that trade. Recognized especially under the custom of London in English law and adopted in some American jurisdictions by statute.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A woman.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A woman; used in legal compounds feme covert (a married woman) and feme sole (a single or unmarried woman).
The ordinary meaning of feme and its legal meaning align at the surface — both simply mean "woman" — but the legal significance is not in the word itself. It is in the status-marking compounds the word anchors. A researcher who encounters feme in a historical legal document without recognizing which compound applies will miss the entire legal point: whether the woman in question held independent legal capacity or was subsumed under coverture.
Common Confusion
Feme covert and feme sole are sometimes conflated or imprecisely used in secondary literature, particularly in historical studies that treat coverture as monolithic. The feme sole trader category further complicates the picture: a woman could be technically a feme covert by marital status yet hold feme sole capacity for commercial purposes. Researchers should resist reading any of these categories as absolute; statutory modifications and local customs created significant practical variation well before formal abolition of coverture.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
— Feme covert: Married woman under coverture.
— Feme sole: Unmarried woman (never married, widowed, or divorced) with full legal capacity.
— Feme sole trader: Married woman with statutory or customary authorization to trade independently; a hybrid status with feme sole capacity limited to commercial dealings.
— Baron et feme: The paired phrase for husband and wife in legal pleading and property contexts; baron denotes the husband.
Why It Matters in Research
Feme and its compounds are extinct in modern legal drafting but saturate common law property records, equity pleadings, probate documents, and treatise literature through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. Researchers working in any of those materials need to recognize the terms on sight.
The critical research trap is chronological: coverture was not abolished uniformly or at once. American jurisdictions passed Married Women's Property Acts beginning in the 1840s, which progressively dismantled the disabilities of feme covert status — but they did so piecemeal, at different times, and with different scope. A document from 1855 in one state may reflect full coverture; the same document from the same year in another state may reflect substantial statutory modification. The term feme covert in a source does not by itself tell you which legal regime applied.
The feme sole trader category appears sporadically in American records and is easily overlooked. Its presence in a document is a signal to investigate whether the jurisdiction had adopted enabling legislation or recognized the custom independently — the answer will affect how the woman's contracts and debts should be read.
In the Law Mind corpus, feme appears most densely in property law materials, equity jurisdiction records, and treatises on domestic relations. Its companion term baron et feme anchors a distinct cluster of feudal tenure and pleading materials. The two clusters overlap but are not identical, and following the cross-references carefully matters.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree on the core definition: feme means woman, with wife as the operative sense in baron et feme. The second edition expands modestly to include brief definitions of feme covert and feme sole as subentries, and the feme covert entry explicitly flags the connection to legal disabilities — a useful confirmation that even the dictionary framed the term in terms of incapacity rather than mere marital status.
Webster's 1913 adds the feme sole trader formulation, which Black's first edition omits, making Webster's more useful as a definitional source for that particular compound. Neither edition of Black's nor Webster's provides substantive analysis of how statutory reform interacted with the common law categories; for that, researchers must turn to contemporary treatises on domestic relations or married women's property law. The dictionary entries treat the categories as static, which they were not.
Jurisdictional Note
Feme covert as a live legal category was progressively abolished across American jurisdictions through Married Women's Property Acts, beginning with Mississippi (1839) and New York (1848), with most states completing the process by the early twentieth century. English law followed a parallel trajectory through the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882. Feme sole trader status, where it existed, was jurisdiction-specific and often required explicit statutory authorization. No general rule applies across jurisdictions; date and place of the source document govern.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Coverture; Married Women's Property Acts; Baron et Feme.