feme
- noun
- /fiːm/
- Archaic
- Historically, a feme was defined in law as either a married or unmarried woman.
Examples
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Under the common law status of feme covert, married women were already "civilly dead;" they did not need to wait for a mistaken diagnosis of death to find themselves buried alive.
Academic text (2014) -
By considering their financial decisions in terms of the feme sole status they had when they made them, we can better understand the economic actions they have in common as well as the ways in which contemporary debates about married women's property rights were being staged through depictions of single women.
Academic text (2016) -
In old legal documents, a woman may be referred to as a feme, indicating her marital status.
-
The term feme was commonly used in the 19th century to describe women in legal contexts.
Synonyms
3
9.3
Having qualities people usually link to women
Surface Forms
Etymology
Feme comes from the Latin femina, which means 'woman', and it is the same root as the modern words female and feminine. In old legal writing feme named a woman and was used to show whether she was married or not, so that's why the word refers to a woman in those old laws.