Abstract
The study has three points of discussion. The first deals with the rights of woman in obtaining property especially the one inherited from parents. The second does with the roles of women in the family. Once women married, their property rights are governed by English common law, legally absorbed by their husbands. Furthermore, married women could not make wills or dispose of any property without their husbands' consent. The third deals with the roles of women in society. A woman is surely forbidden to do any type of job or business. All is done by man. The main theory concerning property rights of women is proposed by Shanley (2000) who states that from the legal 'unity' of the husband and wife, it follows that a married woman could not sue or be sued unless her husband is also a party to the suit, could not sign contracts unless her husband joins her. And for the research method, the Descriptive Qualitative Approach proposed by Bogdan and Biklen (1992) is applied, concerning the opinions, experiences and feeling of individuals producing subjective data. It elaborates social phenomena as they occur naturally. The finding shows that all the female characters in the novel get into the problems of property rights, standings in family as well as in the society.
Highlights
Sense and Sensibility is the story of two sisters, Elinor and MarianneDashwood who with their mother and younger sister, Margaret, are forced into poverty through the untimely death of their father
Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars and Marianne, for Willoughby
Edward turns out to be engaged to anopther girl, Lucy Steele and Willoughby plans to marry Miss Grey,a rich debutante
Summary
Dashwood who with their mother and younger sister, Margaret, are forced into poverty through the untimely death of their father. "Its enactment allowed legal intellectuals to feel that they had corrected an error but preserved for individual women no socially enforced rights; an individual woman got nothing except what her own husband privately elected to bestow" (49) This change was viewed as an erosion of women's property rights as widows were only entitled to an equitable jointure of their husband's estate. In 1887 the Married Woman's Property Act gave women rights to own her own property Her property, frequently inherited from her family, belonged to her husband on marriage. Except in extremely rare cases, a woman could not obtain a divorce and, until 1891, if she ran away from an intolerable marriage the police could capture and return her, and her husband could imprison her All this was sanctioned by church, law, custom, history, and approved of by society in general. By 1861 there were 10,380,285 women living in England and Wales but only 9,825,246 men. (Fausto-Sterling, 2010: 196)
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