Justice & Law Quote by Shana Alexander

A neat little legal fable, told with the smile of a newsroom knife. Alexander’s line mimics the old Blackstone formulation of coverture, but she doesn’t quote it to preserve tradition; she quotes it to expose how tradition launders power. The phrasing “in the eyes of the law” is doing the heavy lifting: it’s a reminder that what counts as reality in civic life is often whatever the state agrees to recognize. Marriage isn’t just romance or ritual here. It’s a merger contract with a CEO already chosen.

The second clause is the sting: “and that one person is the husband.” Alexander takes the supposedly neutral abstraction of “one person” and snaps it back into material consequence. Unity, the law’s favorite poetic word, becomes erasure. The wife isn’t being joined; she’s being absorbed. The wit is journalistic rather than theatrical: plain syntax, crisp cadence, no ornament, because the ugliness doesn’t need embellishment.

Context matters. Writing out of the mid-to-late 20th century, Alexander is speaking into a culture where “separate spheres” ideology still lingered in institutions even as women were entering public life at scale. The quote functions as a pressure-point argument: if the law makes one spouse legally legible and the other legally derivative, then every sentimental defense of marriage is built on an asymmetry people prefer not to name. It’s not just a critique of past doctrine; it’s a warning about how easily intimacy can be drafted into governance.