Coverture is a long-standing legal practice in the United States that comes from the English common law. Coverture holds that a man and a woman are a single legal entity—that of the husband. A married woman loses her own legal obligations and rights, and becomes "covered" by her husband. Traditionally a woman took her husband's last name as a symbol of this identity. A female child was covered by her father's identity. When she married that coverage transferred to her husband. Under this system a woman did not legally exist and did not own anything. 