Oh Mike, you just shook the wrong hornet’s nest. haha, I am teasing. It’s just that I have studied pre-modern history for the last twenty years and written books on this subject. Where to start?…. Low hanging fruit first — property. Married women in England were not allowed to be the legal owners of money or inherit property until 1870 when Parliament finally got their heads out of their arses and passed the Married Women’s Property Act. I can’t tell you how many legal documents I have had to sift through on widows fighting for their property rights after their husbands died too. It is mindboggling. If a man didn’t spell out EXACTLY what was to go to his wife in his will, she was left with squat.
High hanging fruit — English law allowed men to beat their wives “within reason” until the Eighteenth century. aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet. (Source: Commentaries on the Laws of England)
And good luck proving a man raped you. I poured through a lot of those documents too. They never ended well.