1776, Abigail Adams saw an opportunity in the language of natural rights, and wrote to her husband, John Adams: She was not writing generally about women's rights, or specifically about the right to vote. She was asking for relief from coverture. John responded, "I cannot but laugh." According to Chernock, "late Enlightenment radicals .... argued ... [that "coverture" and other "principles"] did not reflect the 'advancements' of a modern, civilized society. Rather, they were markers of past human errors and inconsistencies, and thus in need of further revision." Chernock claimed that "as the editor of Blackstone's Commentaries, [Edward] Christian used his popular thirteenth edition, published in 1800, to highlight the ways in which the practice of coverture might be modified." Chernock wrote that "Christian .... proceeded to recommend that a husband cease to be 'absolutely master of the profits of the wife's lands during the coverture. Chernock reported that other men sought for coverture to be modified or eliminated. According to Ellen Carol DuBois, "the initial target of women's rights protest was the legal doctrine of 'coverture... The earliest American women's right lecturer, John Neal attacked coverture in speeches and public debates as early as 1823, but most prominently in the 1840s, asking "how long [women] shall be rendered by law incapable of acquiring, holding, or transmitting property, except under special conditions, like the slave?" In the 1850s, according to DuBois, Lucy Stone criticized "the common law of marriage because it 'gives the "custody" of the wife's person to her husband, so that he has a right to her even against herself. Stone kept her premarital family name after marriage as a protest "against all manifestations of coverture". DuBois continued, "in the 1850s, .... primarily legal goal [of "the American women's rights movement"] was the establishment of basic property rights for women once they were married, which went to the core of the deprivations of coverture." Chernock continued, "for those who determined that legal reforms were the key to achieving a more enlightened relationship between the sexes, coverture was a primary object of attention." DuBois wrote that coverture, because of property restrictions with the vote, "played a major role in" influencing the effort to secure women's right to vote in the U.S., because one view was that the right should be limited to women who owned property when coverture excluded most women (relatively few were unmarried or widowed), while another