Property Rights Of Married Women Research Articles

A Fool’s Errand? Legal Legacies of Reconstruction in Two Southern States

This Article examines several legal aspects of Reconstruction. It first looks at how the Texas and North Carolina supreme courts helped mediate the transition from a pre-war to a post-war society. Were the courts composed of unconditional Unionists, Conservatives, or a mix? Did they try to help the people of their states accept slav- ery's demise or did they aggravate the sting of defeat? A closely related issue is how Reconstruction lawmakers adjusted the legal rights of blacks following the abolition of slavery. Did they leave a permanent imprint on civil rights law or did they confirm Tourgee's judgment that Reconstruction was ultimately a "fool's errand"?' The Article next examines state constitutional history, which is also necessary for a full understanding of Reconstruction's legal legacy. North Carolina's Reconstruction constitution encompassed not only racial reforms but also a variety of attempts to catch up with social and economic reforms enacted in other parts of the nation before the war. Texas's Reconstruction constitution did the same, albeit to a lesser extent, because Texas had already adopted some of the social and economic reforms in question before the war. Texas enacted a new constitution at the end of Reconstruction and North Carolina added extensive amendments to its constitution at the end of Reconstruction, but both states stopped far short of eradicating all Reconstruction-era constitutional reforms. The Article next examines the evolution of economic law in Texas and North Carolina during the Reconstruction era. Reconstruction had profound economic as well as political consequences for the South. A new agricultural labor system had to be developed to replace slavery. Lawmakers had to arrange an orderly transition from the Confederate financial system back to the federal system and respond to problems arising out of the widespread poverty and debt created by the war. By 1865, the Industrial Revolution was well underway in the North, and the Southern states had to decide whether to shape their legal systems to follow suit or to preserve their rural, agricultural pre-war character. Lastly, the Article examines changes in married women's property rights law during Reconstruction. Many Southern women gained an "experience of self-sufficiency during the war [that] opened the door a crack to the 'strong-minded' women." This fact, together with a desire to alleviate post-war economic distress by protecting family assets from creditors, led several ex-Confederate states, including North Carolina, to expand married women's property rights during Reconstruction. Other Confederate states, including Texas, had been leaders in the married women's property rights movement before the war and therefore experienced less change in this area during Reconstruction.

Consensual Unions, Property Rights, and Patrimonial Violence against Women in Latin America

Abstract Consensual unions in Latin America are becoming more common than marriages. We analyze the evolution of the laws recognizing consensual unions as well as those proscribing domestic violence, including patrimonial violence, for nineteen countries. While the formal property rights of married women and those in consensual unions are now similar, we show that the latter are in a more precarious position, experiencing higher incidences of intimate partner violence. In Colombia and Ecuador, the women in consensual unions also experience higher rates of economic and patrimonial violence. Drawing on qualitative research, we also explore the barriers to women in consensual unions exercising their property rights.

The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer by Bonnie S. Anderson

Reviewed by: The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer by Bonnie S. Anderson Leandra Zarnow Bonnie S. Anderson. The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter: Ernestine Rose, International Feminist Pioneer. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017 Pp. 264, 22 illus. Hardcover, $36.95, ebook $24.99. ISBN 9780199756247, 0199756244. In her generous biography of Ernestine Rose, Bonnie Anderson refocuses attention on this freethinker and feminist "more famous than either Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony in the mid-nineteenth century." (5) Renowned on both sides of the Atlantic, Rose immigrated to New York City in 1836, after earlier stops in Berlin, Paris, and London, each place one move further away from the life she was born into in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland as the daughter of a rabbi. Her father granted his only child the opportunity to learn Hebrew, but not to ask questions. This inherent contradiction led young Ernestine to see how her mind—and that of all women—could not "expand under bolts and bars," and how religion dampened her free will. (13) Rose's first act of defiance—brushing her hair on the Sabbath—foreshadowed her later choice to pen the widely circulated A Defence of Atheism in 1861; she wrote this pamphlet after more than a decade on the speaking circuit promoting women's rights, abolitionism, free thought, and socialism. A consummate orator, Rose's words leap from the page at Anderson's hand. Anderson is upfront about the difficulties she faced getting at Rose's interiority, and makes up for an incomplete personal archive by quoting her subject's speeches and writings at length, contextualizing each turn of argument with care. Readers can imagine audiences hundreds thick, at the edge of their seats, listening to "Mrs. Rose" delivering hours-long speeches alongside more remembered luminaries such as Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and mentor Robert Owen, an influential British socialist. Rose consistently delivered "the speech of the afternoon," carried debates, faced off hecklers, replied to men's toasts, and concluded with force, "Agitate, Agitate!" (74, 78) Her leading fault, according to Anderson, was she "invoked her familiar stance of preferring to be right than to unite." (157) More than a journey of the mind, The Rabbi's Atheist Daughter reads like a travelogue. Anderson, who wrote Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement (2000), is perfectly suited to carry readers on this kind of voyage. She expertly traces Rose's transnational influences, friendships, conference appearances, and impact. As an immigrant working among primarily native-born activists, Rose injected a global perspective in the U.S. women's movement. At the first National Women's Rights convention in [End Page 111] Worcester in 1850, she remarked, "This Convention was not for the women of New England, not of Old England, but for the world." (72) Rose imagined the United States to be on the precipice of social advancement that would serve as a democratic model beyond its borders. At the same time, as a student of the Enlightenment and follower of Owenite socialism, she helped introduce these European movements to an American audience. Anderson casts Rose as a "minority of one" who traversed social movement boundaries. (98) Among feminists and abolitionists, she remained an outsider as an atheist, immigrant, and Jew. In the company of freethinkers, she stood out for her antiracist attachments. Rose promoted a multifaceted women's rights agenda from married women's property rights—she enjoyed an egalitarian marriage to fellow Owenite William Rose—to economic independence in the workplace—she sold her own line of perfumes. Yet, above all else, she believed suffrage to be the gateway to the full realization of human rights. As Rose explained, "The ballot is the focus of all other rights, it is the pivot upon which all others hang." (83) In other words, full political citizenship was necessary to bring women into public view, improve their private lives, and increase their economic standing. Rose made this case widely to both U.S. and European audiences, framing "women's rights as human rights" well before the introduction of this refrain. Rose lived a transnational life, but in what ways did she self-identify as a...

Normative intersectionality in married women's property rights in southern Nigeria

ABSTRACT The fate of marriage gifts during a customary law divorce is significant for the interaction of legal orders in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the context of scholars' fixation with conflict of laws. In analysing this fatet, this article introduces normative intersectionality as a theoretical framework for a nuanced understanding of how laws and socio-economic forces interact in post-colonial settings. Normative intersectionality rejects a legal positivist view of rights, which neglects people's adaptation of indigenous norms to socioeconomic changes. In this sense, normative intersectionality is useful for addressing the traditional Igbo law of matrimonial property, which regards a married woman's property rights as subsumed in her husband's rights. Using the division of marriage gifts in Southern Nigeria as a case study, the article draws attention to how legal orders speak to, rather than against, each other, and in so doing, stresses the adaptive character of indigenous laws. It argues that normative intersectionality illumines the interplay of gender equality, property rights and legal pluralism. Accordingly, it urges judges to use the imitative nature of legal pluralism in post-colonial settings to remedy entrenched systems of injustice and inequality, which often hide under the banner of tradition. Keywords: Adaptive legal pluralism, marriage gifts, African customary law, matrimonial property rights.

Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest

James Bryce observed that state constitutions in the United States were a “mine of instruction for the natural history of democratic communities” (The American Commonwealth, vol. 1, 1888, p. 434). With Frontier Democracy Silvana R. Siddali joins G. Alan Tarr (Understanding State Constitutions, 1998) and Laura J. Scalia (America's Jeffersonian Experiment, 1999) in the project of deciphering this natural history. Her goal is to provide a master survey of midwestern state conventions from 1835 to 1857, and in this she largely succeeds. Siddali synthesizes the political history of eleven constitutional conventions: three in Iowa (1844, 1846, and 1857) and eight in the Old Northwest—one each from Ohio (1851), Illinois (1847), Indiana (1851), and Minnesota (1857); and two each from Wisconsin (1846 and 1848) and Michigan (1835 and 1850). She tallies statistics on delegate age, occupation (26 percent were lawyers), political experience, and place of birth. Convention trends on codification of the common law, popular election of judges, the incorporation of banks, and “superlegislation” (constitutional limits on legislation) are all detailed. She devotes the “Citizens” and “Wives” chapters to the rights of free blacks and the property rights of married women.

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America by Corinne T. Field

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, by Corinne T. Field. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiii, 243 pp. $32.95 US (paper). To the discussion of belonging and exclusion in the United States, Corinne Field brings a new perspective that considers childhood as a construct deployed by adults for social and political purposes. Using an intellectual history approach that relies on the published writings of leading figures, she argues that women's and black rights activists in the antebellum North found in the idea of adulthood--the equal recognition of all people at age twenty-one as mature adults--the foundation for a broad range of reforms in public and private life and an effective, if temporary, basis for cross-racial and cross-class cooperation. Joined by their shared categorization as children and exclusion from full citizenship at the hands of white men, a diverse group of women and black men used equal adulthood to claim the political rights, economic independence, marital equality, familial authority, and sexual autonomy that white men claimed for themselves. As revolutionary-era political leaders made white male maturation, predicated on the perpetual immaturity and dependence of women and African Americans, the basis of republican citizenship, Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women were capable of individual maturation and adult citizenship. Antebellum activists echoed and developed their ideas, as suffrage for white males at age twenty-one made full citizenship a normative life stage, which made chronological age and individual maturation central to discussions of political belonging. As evangelical reformers postulated spheres of activity for women, radical activists such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton defined womanhood temporally rather than spatially, arguing that female maturation required rejecting separate spheres, understanding motherhood as a life stage preparatory to public power, and replacing fear of middle and old age with a pursuit of ongoing development. Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, brought a sharp age consciousness to his autobiography, observing that slaveowners kept slaves ignorant of their ages to avoid empowering them with notions of individual development, and honing in on twenty-one as a decisive transition to manhood and freedom for white boys and--through the timing of his escape--for himself. Unlike Nancy Isenberg in Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998), Field does not directly interrogate abolitionism's impact on antebellum feminism, but she contributes to that inquiry by arguing that Stanton incorporated Douglass' emphasis on the political significance of age twenty-one and worked with him to build a coalition to define equal citizenship. From a different standpoint highlighting protections rather than rights, Harriet Jacobs used chronological age to delineate and defend the sexual purity of girlhood and gamer northern sympathy for female slaves. The unifying power of such tactics was evident in the women's rights conventions of the 1840s and 1850s as activists with disparate goals--political participation, higher education, meaningful work, higher wages, and married women's property rights--claimed in common that all Americans should be equally free at age twenty-one to pursue their ambitions. …

‘His Estate’ – or Hers? Three Chapters in the History of Married Women's Property Rights in Sweden, 1350–1850

Gender & HistoryVolume 25, Issue 2 p. 211-229 Article ‘His Estate’ – or Hers? Three Chapters in the History of Married Women's Property Rights in Sweden, 1350–1850 Maria Ågren, Maria ÅgrenSearch for more papers by this author Maria Ågren, Maria ÅgrenSearch for more papers by this author First published: 23 July 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12014Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume25, Issue2August 2013Pages 211-229 RelatedInformation

In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, Law, and Literature. Kristin Kalsem.

Kristin Kalsem, In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, and Literature (Ohio State University Press, 2012) xiii + 238 $54.95 An unprecedented number of legal reforms 19th century England improved women's lives, reforms such crucial areas as child custody, divorce, married women's property rights, reproductive rights, domestic abuse, and lunacy laws. In her important book In Contempt: Nineteenth-Century Women, and Literature, Kristin Kalsem focuses on the role of writers effecting these legal reforms, writers works she terms outlaw texts because they were outside the law. These works--essays, novels, autobiographies--were not official legal documents, yet they dealt with legal issues affecting women, and, Kalsem argues, were influential changing the laws. The who wrote them can be said to have been in contempt, both the courtroom sense of speaking out of turn and the gendered sense of being held contempt by the male-dominated legal system. Kalsem's book is an interdisciplinary study, bridging the disciplines of literature, law, history, and feminism ways that she hopes will be transformative (175). She does not simply look at laws, but at the participants (real and fictional) and their experiences. The moving force behind her argument derives from law and literature studies, which maintain that the outcome of legal cases is determined not so much by logical argument as by considerations of power. Consequently, as Richard Delgado observes Legal Storytelling, the dominant group society creates its own story, and narratives help to give credence to people from outgroups, people whose voice and has been suppressed (Delgado 64). And as Paul Gewirtz notes Narrative and Rhetoric Law, storytelling law is important for outsider groups, particularly racial and religious minorities and women (Gewirtz 5). In Contempt presents the stories of who bring their own experiences as into their narratives, thus providing a perspective that was missing from the patriarchal legal system and performing what might be called feminist jurisprudence. Kalsem begins by looking at the legal status of at the beginning of the century. As William Blackstone wrote 1765 his Commentaries on the Laws of England, By marriage, the and wife are one person law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband (Blackstone 1:430). Blackstone's Commentaries explains British Common which was also the basis for the American legal system. What it meant for was that once a woman married, she gave up her rights as an individual and was covered by her husband. Under coverture a woman had no independent existence. She had no access to money of her own, no right to her children, and no legal rights (she could not sign contracts, make wills, serve on juries, sue or be sued). In the first chapter, Kalsem discusses Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished Gothic novel The Wrongs of Woman; or Maria (1797), which provides a powerful critique of women's legal oppression. The Gothic novel, asserts Kalsem, is a particularly effective way of portraying the dissonant effects that marriage laws had on (21). Critics like D. A. Miller and Edward Said have maintained that the 19th century novel policed society and did not question but instead reified social institutions including the legal system (29). Kalsem, however, points out that whereas such an analysis might apply to canonical 19th century novels, it does not apply to outlaw texts, novels that explicitly or implicitly critique existing laws relating to women. Maria provides a dramatic indictment of coverture. The heroine is shown to be subject to a tyrannical actions are totally within the law: he spends all of her inherited money on drinking, gambling, and on other women; takes her child from her; and has her confined to a madhouse. …

Human Capital Accumulation and the Expansion of Women's Property Rights

Most U.S. states passed married women's property and earnings acts between 1850 and 1920. These acts gave married women the right to own and control their separate property, and to own their market earnings. We examine the acts' effects on investment by families in girls' human capital. Standard approaches to the economics of property rights imply that, as married women gain the right to their earnings and to own and control property, the incentive to invest in women's and girls' human capital will rise. This will be observed through increases in the rates of girls' schooling relative to boys'. We posit that a state's passage of a married women's property act and earnings act will lead to an increase in women's (girls') school attendance relative to boys. We use state level census data on school attendance to test for these effects, examining the difference in schooling rates for girls and boys. Our empirical analysis indicates that this expansion of women's economic rights resulted in higher rates of relative school attendance by girls, and that the effects of earnings acts are larger than those of the property acts. We also find that the effect of strengthening married women's property rights is substantially stronger in common law states than in community property states. These findings are robust to several ways of controlling for the possible endogeneity of changes in women's property rights.

“THE WIDOW, THE CLERGYMAN AND THE RECKLESS”:1 WOMEN INVESTORS IN ENGLAND, 1830—1914

Modern historians infrequently acknowledge that women were financial investors before the twentieth century. Yet a study of nineteenth-century England shows substantial groups of women investing for income, capital growth, or a share in the family business. This article will summarize the evidence for women as investors and consider why their participation has been until recently largely ignored by scholars. Second, it will analyze the forms taken by women's investment, exploring the extent to which the development of the stock market and legal changes in married women's property rights facilitated a growing female role in investment. Third, it will analyze the objectives and needs of the three main groups of women investors: speculators, income-seekers, and family investors. The findings have implications for understanding the economic position of women before the First World War and also for contemporary discussion of women's wealth and investment.

Liberalism and Married Women’s Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Liberalism and Married Women’s Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Empowering women: land and property rights in Latin America

The expansion of married women's property rights was a main achievement of the first wave of feminism in Latin America. As Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena Leon reveal, however, the disjuncture between rights and actual ownership remains vast. This is particularly true in rural areas, where the distribution of land between men and women is highly unequal. In their pioneering, twelve-country comparative study, the authors argue that property ownership is directly related to women's bargaining power within the household and community, point out changes resulting from recent gender-progressive legislation, and identify additional areas for future reform, including inheritance rights of wives.

Derechos de propiedad, herencia de las esposas e igualdad de género: aspectos comparativos entre Brasil e Hispanoamérica

En América Latina durante el curso del siglo XX se lograron considerables avances para fortalecer los derechos de propiedad de la mujer casada. Sin embargo, se ha prestado atención limitada a los derechos de herencia de las esposas. La revisión de las normas legales en doce países permite argumentar que las viudas están a menudo en una posición de desventaja en comparación con las hijas/os de la pareja. Las normas sobre herencia no fueron diseñadas para dar a las viudas la posibilidad de autonomía económica, por medio del control de la finca familiar o los negocios. Si se tiene en cuenta la diferencia de género a favor de la mujer en la expectativa de vida y la cobertura limitada de las mujeres en la seguridad social (especialmente las rurales) en la mayoría de los países, las mujeres son particularmente vulnerables cuando enviudan. Es urgente que el movimiento de mujeres tenga en cuenta en su agenda el tema de los derechos de herencia, en razón de que su fortalecimiento es necesario para el logro de la redistribución de la propiedad y de una al igualdad de género

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women's rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas--before and after 1848--that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women's rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg shows, they developed a rich theoretical tradition that influenced not only subsequent strains of feminist thought but also ideas about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally. By focusing on rights discourse and political theory, Isenberg moves beyond a narrow focus on suffrage. Democracy was in the process of being redefined in antebellum America by controversies over such volatile topics as fugitive slave laws, temperance, Sabbath laws, capital punishment, prostitution, the Mexican War, married women's property rights, and labor reform--all of which raised significant legal and constitutional questions. These pressing concerns, debated in women's rights conventions and the popular press, were inseparable from the gendered meaning of nineteenth-century citizenship. |Illuminates the origins of American feminism by showing how antebellum feminists moved beyond suffrage to influence thinking about the nature of citizenship and rights more generally.

Uniformity and Conformity: Regionalism and the Adjudication of the Married Women's Property Acts

Marriage law was determined by the states, but displays few of the regional differences marking other areas of law in early nineteenth-century America. While there were some regional variations in the statutory law defining married women's property rights, these were reduced as judges applied common law standards and techniques of interpretation to their application in particular cases. Judicial discretion and use of a common standard meant that there was considerable uniformity in this area of law across the nation. This study supports arguments that an accurate understanding of nineteenth-century America requires acknowledging the unevenness of sectional differences in various spheres of law and public life.

New woman meets Shakespeare woman: the struggle over the figure of Portia in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract Approaching the material from the perspective of cultural history, this essay explores the ways in which England, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, witnessed considerable debate about the character of Portia from Shakespeare'sThe Merchant of Venice. Feminists seized upon her appearance as a lawyer to argue for Shakespeare's advocacy on behalf of women's emancipation. Anti-feminists stressed the character's acquiescence to male control of her affections and her estate. Thus for many readers and viewers of the play concern about the status of the New Woman, civic maternalism, married women's property rights, and women in the professions, overrode their interest in the play as a text about Christians and Jews.

The Influence of Canon Law on the Property Rights of Married Women in England

The Influence of Canon Law on the Property Rights of Married Women in England

The Growth in Pennsylvania of the Property Rights of Married Women

The Growth in Pennsylvania of the Property Rights of Married Women

Notes on the Property Rights of Married Women in Virginia

Notes on the Property Rights of Married Women in Virginia