she owns lands as her statutory separate estate. Hence a distinction, which modern legislation tends all the while to obliterate, between the conveyance of the wife's general land and of her separate land. As to the latter, estoppel en pais is sometimes applicable; but not so, usually, with the former. In the one case the wife's own conduct during coverture, by way of affirmance or receiving benefits, and more especially her fraudulent conduct, may bind her in spite of some defective method of conveyauce; in the other and present case it does not. As to the wife's separate real estate, the husband is frequently her managing agent, to collect rents and deal with the tenant on her behalf; 2 and some codes make him her trustee, with power to manage and control such real estate.3 § 98. Wife's Life Estate; Joint Tenancy, &c. -If the wife at the time of her marriage has a life estate in lands, her husband becomes seised of such estate in the right of his wife, and he is entitled to the profits during coverture. So if it were granted to a trustee for her own use. And the same rule applies whether the estate be for the life of the wife or of some other person. If the estate be for the wife's own life it terminates at her death, and the husband has no further interest in it. But if it be an estate for the life of another person who survives her, the husband takes the profits during the remainder of such person's life as a special occupant of the land. The husband's representatives in either case take crops growing on the land at the time of his death. But the husband might, at common law, take a release or confirmation to enlarge his life estate. The conveyance of the wife's life estate follows the usual statute rule as to her conveyances.6 1 See cs. 10, 11, post; also Wood v. Terry, 30 Ark. 385; Oglesby Coal Co. v. Pasco, 79 Ill. 164; Sims v. Everhardt, 102 U. S. 300; Bedford v. Burton, 106 U. S. 338; 108 Ind. 301. 2 See Kingsman v. Kingsman, 6 Q. B. D. 122; Cahill v. Lee, 55 Md. 319; Buck v. Lee, 36 Ark. 525. 3 81 Ala. 411. 5 Co. Litt. 299. 6 Henning v. Harrison, 13 Bush, 723. As concerns the wife's life estate in her real or personal property, the English chancery courts have followed out exceptions to the doctrines of equitable assignment already noticed, with their limitations. See Purdew v. Jackson, 1 Russ. 1; Schouler, Hus. & Wife, 42 Kent, Com. 134; 1 Bright, Hus. § 157; supra, § 84. & Wife, 112, 113. A husband acquires, by his marriage, the right to use and occupy, during coverture, lands held by his wife in joint tenancy.1 § 99. Husband's Freehold Interest in Wife's Land not Devisable by Wife. The freehold which the husband acquires in his own right in the real estate of his wife during her coverture is a subject upon which the wife's devise cannot operate, more than her conveyance, independently of his permission.2 CHAPTER VII. COVERTURE MODIFIED BY EQUITY AND RECENT STATUTES. § 100. Prevalent Tendency to Equalize the Sexes; Marriage Relation Affected. Aside from woman's political relations, and those social and business opportunities, not peculiar to the marriage state, which are now extended considerably to her sex, we may observe, both in England and the United States, a liberal disposition of court and legislature within the present century to bring her nearer to the plane of manhood, and advance her condition from obedient wife to something like co-equal marriage partner. Man makes the concessions, step by step, out of deference to woman's wishes, and in token of her influence; and thus does the coverture theory of marriage gradually fade out of our jurisprudence. The liberal tendencies of modern civilization favor this change: moreover, that love of justice and individual liberty which always characterized our Saxon race, and the steadfast disposition of English and American courts both to administer the written law impartially, and to extend and adapt its provisions to the ever-changing wants of society. Our preceding pages have shown, in respect to the person of the spouses, their matrimonial domicile, the conjugal restraint 1 Bishop v. Blair, 36 Ala. 80; Roy. See post, as to the wills of married ston v. Royston, 21 Ga. 161. women, § 203, n. 2 Clarke's Appeal, 79 Penn. St. 376. and correction of the wife, the custody of the offspring-again, as to the wife's power to bind as agent, her necessaries, or, in respect of property, her equity to a settlement, and modern modes of conveying her lands—a modern disposition to so construe and apply or modify even the old law that she may enjoy a very fair share of freedom and consideration in the household, and maintain her dignity under all circumstances. Husband and wife cease to be one; they are two distinct persons with distinct and independent rights. At the same time the idea of unity in the domestic government of domestic government at all becomes weakened; the cruel or dissolute husband having less power for ill, and the just and faithful one, too, finding his legal authority over a high-tempered companion exceedingly precarious. Modern legislation accomplishes even more than judicial construction towards this result, especially in the United States; and indeed, as to the married women's acts and divorce acts of this day, it may be truly said that England borrows more from this country than does this country from England. Of the American married women's acts, which relate chiefly to their property and contracts, we have already spoken.1 These acts are modern; still, they are constantly undergoing local change, and immense labor has been necessarily bestowed by local courts during the last forty years in expounding them. We shall seek to place before the reader such legal results as may be thought to have passed into principles; as for the rest, it is a chaos of uninteresting rubbish, from which the practitioner selects only that which obtains in his own jurisdiction. All this legislation regarding the rights of married women should be harmonized and simplified as soon as practicable. This is not easy with so many independent States, each carving out its own career. And the difficulty is aggravated from the fact that the married women's acts were experimental advances and had no common origin; there was no model found to work from, English or American, and the results were necessarily discordant and variable. 1 See Part I., supra. How to § 101. Modern Changes in Married Women's Rights, be Studied. — The changes to which we shall proceed to direct the reader's inquiry, under our main heading, must be studied as by way of supplement or supersedure to the coverture doctrines set forth in the chapters preceding. As before, these changes affect the wife's debts and contracts, her injuries and frauds, and her personal and real property. They are partly of equitable and partly of statutory origin. But, most of all, they impair the old doctrine which treated the husband as absolute or temporary owner, controller, and manager of his wife's property and acquisitions, by virtue of the marriage, and create in favor of the wife what is commonly known in these days as her separate property.1 Here, therefore, as on most points relating to the law of husband and wife, one must first examine the old common-law or coverture doctrine, and then perceive how far modern equity rules or the local legislation may have varied that law. Such changes date back not much farther than a century, the most radical of them being less than half a century old; the equitable changes being for the most part of earlier, and the statutory changes of later, date, and the law of England and this country harmonizing on the whole subject, at the independence of the American colonies, as at their first settlement. The instances will be found rare at the present day, where an important common-law principle respecting the wife's contracts, torts, property, and the formalities of suit is not found at this day essentially changed. § 102. Modern Equity and Statute Doctrine; England and the United States. As preliminary to an exposition of the wife's separate property, we may observe that there is an equitable. doctrine on this subject and a statutory doctrine. The equitable doctrine is the prior in point of time, and is chiefly the work of English chancery courts; while the statutory doctrine, which is of later date, is founded in the married women's acts, now familiar in our several States, and their judicial construction. 1 More gradually, perhaps, and yet surely in tendency, general rights as to the person of the spouse suffer great change in this later generation; and this largely by indirection. See c. 2, supra. The equitable doctrine is more purely English; the statutory doctrine more purely American, though each country has come, ere this day, to borrow in such respects from the other. American cases frequently distinguish still between an equitable separate estate and a statutory separate estate in favor of a wife; but so sweeping is the latest legislation in most States that such a distinction becomes of comparatively little consequence. CHAPTER VIII. THE WIFE'S SEPARATE PROPERTY; ENGLISH DOCTRINE. § 103. Origin and Nature of Separate Estate in Chancery. In the present chapter, and with reference to Great Britain, our concern is almost exclusively with the remarkable development of an equitable doctrine of separate property. Emerging from coverture and the common law, we come out into the light of equity; and here all things assume a new aspect. The married woman is no longer buried under legal fictions. She ceases to hold the strange position of a being without an existence, one whose identity is suspended or sunk in the status of her husband; she becomes a distinct person, with her own property rights and liabilities. Her condition is not as independent as before marriage; this the very idea of the marriage relation and the disabilities of her sex forbid. But she is dependent only so far as the laws of nature and the forms of society make her so; while her comparative feebleness renders her the special object of chancery protection whenever the interests of herself and her husband clash together. She may contract on her own behalf; she may sue and be sued in her own name; she may hold lands, goods, and chattels in her own right, which property is known as the wife's separate estate, or estate limited to the wife's separate use; and procedure is chiefly in rem. The doctrine of the wife's separate estate originated in the spreading conviction that it was expedient for the interests of society that means should exist by which, upon marriage, either |