If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.

中文翻译：

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“婚姻不能保护犯罪”：18 世纪英格兰的掩护、性与婚内强奸

如果掩饰证明了父权制控制并合法地抹去了妻子独立存在的许多方面，这是否意味着 18 世纪英国的丈夫也对妻子的性身体享有绝对权威？本文探讨了同时代人如何描述配偶之间的性界限，以及妻子在遭到丈夫侵犯时可以做什么。妻子们几乎没有法律保护，社会和经济资源也有限，无法逃避不想要的婚内性行为，但少数能够负担得起高额费用的妻子转向教会法庭，希望与丈夫合法分居。这里探讨的教会法庭的五个案例研究是例外的，首先，因为性问题是它们的核心，其次，因为不寻常的附带证据幸存下来，描述了律师和法官对配偶在婚姻中的身体权利的看法。无论她们是想从生育劳作、性病感染、性暴力威胁，还是婚内强奸造成的创伤中寻求解脱，这些妻子都想逃离她们的丈夫——但她们面临着障碍。由于英国教会法并未明确将性不和视为离婚的正当理由，因此女性律师必须证明不受欢迎的性关系是残忍行为。通过援引人身安全、礼仪和礼仪以及感性和同情，倡导者反对丈夫的绝对婚姻权威。