MARRIED WOMEN'S PROPERTY ACTS

Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the property rights of American married women followed the dictates of common law, under which everything a woman owned became her husband's property upon her marriage. Married women could not hold, buy, or sell property, sue or be sued, enter into contracts, or retain their own wages. Between 1839 and 1895, this tradition was gradually reversed by a series of Married Women's Property Acts, passed in varying forms by every state in the Union.

In some states, the acts were limited in scope, shaped primarily to serve the interests of fathers wishing to protect their estates from improvident sons-in-law and husbands seeking to sequester their own property from seizure for debts. Typical of this pattern was America's first Married Women's Property Act, passed in Mississippi in 1839. This law (most of which dealt specifically with slaveholdings) guaranteed the right of married women to receive income from their property and protected it against being seized for their husbands' debts, but the law left husbands in sole charge of buying, selling, or managing the property.

In other states, especially where women's rights movements took a leading role in the campaigns, more ambitious property reform laws were passed, usually during the decade before the Civil War. In New York State in 1860, for instance, the lobbying of women's rights advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped win passage of one of the nation's most comprehensive Married Women's Property Acts. This law guaranteed wives' right to own, buy, and sell property, to sign contracts, to sue and be sued, to keep their own wages, and to be joint guardians of their children. By the mid-1870s, almost all the states in the North had passed Married Women's Property Acts, and by the end of the century, the southern states had as well. Although the scope of these laws varied widely from state to state, taken together they represented a sweeping transfer of property rights and a historic improvement in the status of American married women.

See also Feminist Movement; Marriage.