History isn’t short on baffling laws, but some of the most bizarre and controlling ones have been aimed squarely at women. From rules about what women could wear, to laws dictating their behaviour, movements, and even facial expressions, there’s no shortage of legislation that reads more like parody than policy. However, these laws were real, and in many cases, they shaped women’s lives for generations.
Here are some of the strangest, and often most ridiculous, historical laws that were aimed at controlling and punishing women.
Women couldn’t inherit property under common law.
For centuries in Britain, primogeniture—the system where the eldest son inherits everything—left daughters with almost nothing. Under English common law, unmarried women had very few rights to inherit property, and married women had even fewer. Once a woman married, her legal identity was effectively absorbed into her husband’s. She couldn’t own property, enter into contracts, or take legal action on her own.
This legal doctrine was known as coverture, and it lasted well into the 19th century. A woman could be born into a wealthy family, marry a man with nothing, and still lose her rights to her own fortune the moment the vows were said. The law treated women not as people in their own right, but as extensions of their husbands.
It wasn’t until the Married Women’s Property Act 1870 that women in Britain began to regain the legal ability to own and control property. This act allowed married women to be the legal owners of the money they earned and to inherit property, marking a significant shift in women’s financial independence.
The “scold’s bridle” was used to silence outspoken women.
In early modern Britain, there was a peculiar obsession with silencing women who were considered too opinionated, especially if they criticised men or spoke out in public. Enter the scold’s bridle, a metal contraption locked onto a woman’s head and jaw, often with a spike to press down on the tongue. It was used to punish women labelled as “scolds”—essentially, women accused of being too loud, argumentative, or generally “nuisance wives.” It was never applied to men who shouted or argued, of course.
The law didn’t just punish what women did; it punished how they sounded. Public humiliation was part of the sentence. Women were paraded through towns wearing these devices, essentially turned into spectacles of shame. The practice started in the 16th century and lingered in parts of Britain into the 18th.
It’s a brutal example of how the legal system targeted not just women’s behaviour, but their very voices.
Women were once banned from wearing trousers.
Throughout history, women wearing trousers has been considered scandalous, subversive, and, at times, illegal. While Britain never had a blanket law banning women from wearing trousers nationwide, local laws and social codes effectively criminalised it. Women could be arrested for “masquerading” as men or for causing a public disturbance by dressing “improperly.”
In France, the ban was much more explicit—a law from 1800 made it illegal for women to wear trousers in Paris unless they had permission from the police. That law technically remained on the books until 2013.
In Britain, women pushing for the right to wear trousers faced massive backlash. When Amelia Bloomer promoted her famous “bloomers” in the mid-19th century, British satirists ridiculed her and anyone who tried the look. Suffragettes who wore trousers during protests were sometimes physically attacked, and even arrested under public order laws.
All because they dared to wear clothing designed for comfort and practicality.
The Witchcraft Act made female knowledge criminal.
The Witchcraft Act of 1542 (later updated in 1563 and again in 1604) effectively turned thousands of women into criminals for possessing knowledge. The law made it a capital offence to “conjure spirits,” cast spells, or even possess certain herbs and tools.
While a few men were caught up in witch trials, women were the overwhelming majority of those accused and executed. Midwives, herbalists, and older women who lived alone were particularly vulnerable. Their knowledge of healing, childbirth, and local remedies, once relied upon, became suspicious.
It wasn’t just superstition. It was about control. The law punished women who stepped outside their expected roles, and in a time when science and religion were clashing, and women were expected to be silent and obedient, knowledge became dangerous.
The last execution for witchcraft in Britain happened in 1727, and the Witchcraft Act itself wasn’t repealed until 1951, which says a lot.
Husbands were legally allowed to beat their wives.
For much of British legal history, domestic violence wasn’t just tolerated, it was legal. Under the so-called “rule of thumb”, it was widely believed (though not officially written) that a man could beat his wife with a stick, so long as it was no thicker than his thumb.
This grim “rule” has been heavily mythologised, but the principle behind it was real. British courts rarely intervened in what were seen as “domestic matters,” and men who beat their wives were rarely punished unless the violence was extreme or public.
It wasn’t until the late 19th century that courts began to take domestic violence more seriously, and even then, progress was slow. The idea that wives were their husband’s property, and that discipline was his right, was deeply ingrained in both law and custom. The fact that it took until 1976 for Britain to introduce the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act is a stark reminder of how long women were left without proper legal protection in their own homes.
Women could be imprisoned for being “promiscuous.”
Under the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s, women suspected of being prostitutes, or just sexually active, could be detained, forcibly examined, and locked up if found to have venereal disease. Men, by contrast, faced no such scrutiny or punishment.
The laws were introduced to protect soldiers from sexually transmitted infections, but in practice, they allowed police to round up women on the flimsiest suspicion. Women were dragged off the street and subjected to humiliating internal examinations. If they refused, they could be jailed.
Campaigners like Josephine Butler led the charge to have the laws repealed, arguing that they were degrading and targeted working-class women unfairly. The Acts were finally repealed in 1886 after years of protests. The message behind the laws was clear: women’s sexuality was to be policed, punished, and hidden, while men’s was ignored or excused.
Women couldn’t serve on juries until 1920.
For most of British legal history, women were seen as too emotional, too soft, or simply too unqualified to sit on a jury. Even after gaining the right to vote in 1918 (if they were over 30), women still couldn’t participate in one of the most basic civic duties, sitting in judgement in a court of law.
That finally changed with the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, which came into effect in 1920. It allowed women not just to serve on juries, but to enter professions like law, accountancy, and the civil service.
Still, even after the law changed, women were often discouraged or quietly excluded. Many courts continued to select all-male juries well into the 1930s, and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that female jurors became a regular sight.
So while technically legal after 1920, women’s full inclusion in the justice system took much longer to become a reality.
Pregnant women could be executed, just not immediately.
Under older English law, a pregnant woman sentenced to death could plead her belly, a legal mechanism that delayed execution until after childbirth. It didn’t spare her life entirely, but it bought time. A jury of matrons would be assembled to examine the woman and confirm the pregnancy. If found to be with child, the execution was postponed. Sometimes, women gave birth and were hanged shortly after. In other cases, the delay allowed public sentiment to turn or petitions to be raised. Some women were eventually pardoned.
It’s a grim loophole, but one that shows how the law treated women’s bodies not as theirs, but as vessels for something more valuable. The unborn child had legal weight; the mother often didn’t. This practice faded as executions became rarer and attitudes shifted, but the idea that a pregnant woman had to earn a delay in punishment by proving her condition is deeply telling.
Female pub owners needed a male backer.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, many women ran pubs and inns, often as widows who took over from their late husbands. But legally, they needed the approval of local magistrates, who were all male, and often held outdated views about what women could handle.
In some areas, women were discouraged or outright banned from holding a licence on their own. They needed a male relative or business partner to act as a guarantor. Even if they were perfectly capable, they were considered too emotional or too easily manipulated to be trusted with alcohol sales and customer disputes.
It wasn’t until the 20th century that women began to be treated more equally in licensing law. However, for a long time, female publicans had to rely on the legal backing of a man, even when they were the ones actually running the business.
History is full of strange laws, but the strangest—and most telling—are the ones aimed directly at women.
Whether they controlled how women dressed, spoke, or lived, these laws reveal just how threatened societies have been by women who step outside prescribed roles.
While many of these laws have long since been repealed or reformed, they’ve left traces in attitudes, assumptions, and the structure of law itself. It’s a reminder that what might seem absurd in hindsight was once very real, and that progress isn’t something we can take for granted.
