The Roman Catholic Churchs policy of considering clandestine marriages and marriages made without parental consent to be valid was controversial, and in the 16th century both the French monarchy and the Lutheran church sought to end these practices, with limited success.The New Testament made no pronouncements about wives property rights, which in practice were influenced more by secular laws than religion. Most influential in the pre-modern West was the civil law, except in English-speaking countries where English common law emerged in the High Middle Ages. In addition, local customary law influenced wives property rights; as a result wives property rights in the pre-modern West varied widely from region to region. Because wives property rights and daughters inheritance rights varied widely from region to region due to differing legal systems, the amount of property a wife might own varied greatly. Under the English common law system, which dates to the later medieval period, daughters and younger sons were usually excluded from landed property if no will was produced. Under English common law, there was a system where a wife with a living husband ("feme couvert") could own little property in her own name. Unable to easily support herself, marriage was very important to most womens economic status. This problem has been dealt with extensively in literature, where the most important reason for womens limited power was the denial of equal education and equal property rights for females.
The purpose of the dowry varies by culture and has varied historically. In some cultures, it was paid not only to support the establishment of a new family, but also served as a condition that if the husband committed grave offenses upon his wife, the dowry had to be returned to the wife or her family; but during the marriage, the dowry was often made inalienable by the husband. Today, dowries continue to be expected in parts of South Asia such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, and conflicts related to their payment sometimes result in violence such as dowry deaths and bride burning. Changing of name upon marriage
In some cultures, particularly in the Anglophone West, wives often change their surnames to that of the husband upon getting married. For some, this is a controversial practice, due to its tie to the historical doctrine of coverture and to the historically subordinated roles of wives. Others argue that today this is merely a harmless tradition that should be accepted as a free choice. Some jurisdictions consider this practice as discriminatory and contrary to womens rights, and have restricted or banned it; for example, since 1983, when Greece adopted a new marriage law which guaranteed gender equality between the spouses, women in Greece are required to keep their birth names for their whole life.