Definition
An Old French and Law French term meaning woman or wife. In legal usage, femme is the root form underlying the compound terms feme covert and feme sole, which were the operative categories in the common law of coverture. Standing alone, femme appears in older legal texts and pleadings as a synonym for feme — a woman, and more specifically a married woman when context implies the coverture relationship.
The term carries no independent legal force in modern law; its significance is entirely historical and terminological, serving as the building block for doctrines that governed women's legal capacity, property rights, and contractual ability under the common law from the medieval period through the nineteenth century.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A woman, wife, or girl; in contemporary LGBTQ+ contexts, a lesbian or queer woman whose presentation is feminine as opposed to butch; more broadly, a feminine-leaning gender identity.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A woman. Also used in the compound femme de chambre, meaning a lady's maid or chambermaid.
The gap between common and legal meaning here runs in an unexpected direction. In ordinary modern English, femme has acquired a specific subcultural meaning tied to gender expression and queer identity that has nothing to do with its legal genealogy. Researchers encountering the word in historical legal sources should not import any of these modern connotations — in legal texts, femme is simply the Law French word for woman or wife, used interchangeably with feme, and pointing exclusively toward coverture doctrine.
Common Confusion
Femme and feme are variant spellings of the same Law French word and function identically in historical legal sources. Neither spelling is consistently preferred across time or jurisdiction — Blackstone, Coke, and their successors use both. Burrill's Law Dictionary itself cross-references the two without distinction. Researchers should treat femme and feme as equivalent when searching historical corpora and should not assume that variant spelling signals a difference in meaning or legal effect.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers will rarely encounter femme as a standalone legal term in well-indexed modern sources; it surfaces primarily in two contexts: early printed legal texts and manuscripts where Law French or mixed Latin-French terminology has not been modernized, and as a headword or cross-reference in historical dictionaries pointing toward the substantive doctrinal entries for feme covert and feme sole.
The practical trap is spelling variation. Historical legal sources spell this word inconsistently — femme, feme, fame, and occasionally fem — and digitized corpus searches that fix on one spelling will miss the others. Full-text searches in Law Mind should account for all variants.
The deeper research issue is that femme itself is a gateway term, not a destination. Finding it in a source is a signal to move immediately to feme covert or feme sole, where the substantive doctrine — covering disability to contract, property holding, separate estate, dower rights, and the eventual statutory reforms — actually lives. Researchers tracing the history of married women's property rights, capacity to sue, or testamentary power should use femme/feme as a navigational marker pointing toward those entries and the relevant encyclopedia coverage.
Chronologically, the term's appearance in a source is a rough dating signal: legal writing that uses femme or feme without explanation or apology is likely pre-twentieth century. Twentieth-century sources that retain the term at all are almost invariably discussing the historical doctrine rather than applying it.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary treats femme as a Law French term meaning woman or wife, immediately cross-referencing feme as the primary entry and directing the reader there for substantive content. This is the standard approach in nineteenth-century legal dictionaries: femme functions as an orthographic variant and receives no independent doctrinal treatment. Burrill situates the entry in a section that also includes fenatio (the fawning season in forest law) and fence, which reflects the purely alphabetical organization of such works rather than any conceptual grouping.
Webster's 1913 confirms the ordinary meaning — woman — and offers the compound femme de chambre as evidence of the word's currency in general educated English of the period, suggesting that legal and lay usage of the root word were not far apart in the nineteenth century. The legal significance was always in the compounds, not in the bare term.
What historical dictionaries do not address is the doctrine itself: a researcher finding femme in Burrill is pointed to feme but must then consult Blackstone's Commentaries, Kent's Commentaries, or the relevant married women's property acts for the substance of what feme covert status actually meant in practice.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See FEME COVERT for the doctrine governing married women's legal disability under coverture.
See FEME SOLE for the contrasting status of unmarried women and, in equity, married women granted independent legal capacity.