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Submit a paragraph reflection on EACH reading/watching/listening
assignment provided below (there are 3 of them). It need not be formal
or overly analytical. A casual reflection based on the reading’s
relevance to your life is perfectly suitable for this assignment. You
might also incorporate questions or concepts that did not make sense.
You may critique it or debate the positions. You can share what you
learned that you didn’t know before. In short, so long as they are
directly reflecting on the assigned piece. For this week, write ONE
paragraph for Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts, ONE
paragraph for Married Women’s Property Act – Women & the American
Story and ONE paragraph for the NPR podcast episode “The Supreme Court.”
This means that you will submit a total of THREE paragraphs for your
work. The other 2 are provided in the pdf below The 3rd: NPR podcast episode “The Supreme Court.” : https://www.npr.org/2021/09/22/1039822099/the-supreme-court-2020
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Married Women’s Property Act – Women & the American Story
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Married Women’s Property Act
Document Text
Summary
“An Act for the protection and
preservation of the rights of Married
Women.”
Section 1. Be it enacted, by the
The Mississippi state government
Legislature of the State of Mississippi,
declares that married women can
That any married woman may
possess property.
become seized or possessed of any
property, real or personal, by direct
bequest, demise, gift, purchase, or
distribution, in her own name, and as
of her own property: Provided, the
same does not come from her
husband after coverture.
Section 2. And be it further enacted,
If a women owns enslaved people, she
That hereafter when any woman
retains her rights over them if she gets
possessed of a property in slaves, shall married. These enslaved people
marry, her property in such slaves and cannot be claimed to pay off the debts
their natural increase shall continue
of her husband.
to her, notwithstanding her coverture;
and she shall have, hold, and possess
the same, as her separate property,
exempt from any liability for the debts
or contracts of the husband.
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Section 3. And be it further enacted,
If a married woman receives enslaved
That when any woman, during
people as a gift or inheritance, they
coverture, shall become entitled to, or
are her property. They cannot be
possessed of, slaves by conveyance,
claimed to pay off the debts of her
gift, inheritance, distribution, or
husband.
otherwise, such slaves, together with
their natural increase, shall ensure
and belong to the wife, in like manner
as is above provided as to slaves
which she may possess at the time of
marriage.
Section 4. And be it further enacted,
Any enslaved people owned by a
That the control and management of married woman will be managed by
all such slaves, the direction of their
her husband. Her husband is also the
labor, and the receipt of the
owner of any goods the enslaved
productions thereof, shall remain to
people produce. If the enslaved
the husband, agreeably to the laws
people are claimed in a lawsuit, it
heretofore in force. All suits to recover
must name the husband and wife
the property or possession of such
together. If the wife dies, her enslaved
slaves, shall be prosecuted or
people pass first to any children she
defended, as the case may be, in the
had with her husband. If there are no
joint names of the husband and wife.
children, the husband will inherit the
In the case of the death of the wife,
enslaved people.
such slaves descend and go to the
children of her and her said husband,
jointly begotten, and in case there
shall be no child born to the wife
during such her coverture, then such
slaves shall descend and go to the
husband and to his heirs.
Section 5. And be it further enacted,
Enslaved people owned by a woman
That the slaves owned by a femme
can be sold by a deed that both the
covert under the provisions of this act, husband and wife approve.
may be sold by the joint deed of
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husband and wife, executed, proved,
and recorded, agreeably to the laws
now in force in regard to the
conveyance of the real estate of
femme coverts, and not otherwise.
“An Act for the Protection and Preservation of the rights of Married Women,” Mississippi Laws, 1839,
ch. 46, p. 72.
Background
In the early U.S., women’s status was defined by the legal principle of coverture.
Under coverture, married women had no legal or economic identity apart from
their husbands. They could not own property, run businesses, or represent
themselves in court.
But not every woman in the U.S. was raised under this legal principle.
Indigenous women’s rights varied from community to community, but in many
tribes, Indigenous women had more rights than white women. Mexican
women had the legal right to inherit and own land separate from their
husbands. When the U.S. government tried to limit the rights of Mexican
women in lands gained after the Mexican-American War, those women pushed
back.
These differences resulted in the advancement of women’s rights in the case of
Chickasaw woman Betsy Love. Betsy inherited enslaved people from her
parents. She was married to a white man named James Allen, but the couple
followed the Chickasaw tradition of holding her property separate from his. In
1831, James lost a court case and was ordered to surrender all of his personal
property to pay his fine. The government officials who collected his property
also took the enslaved people who belonged to Betsy, citing the U.S. law that
anything a wife brought to a marriage became the property of her husband.
Betsy sued, and her case went all the way to the Mississippi Supreme Court. In
1837, the court ruled in her favor, saying that she had the right to follow the
customs she was raised with.
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White legislators took notice of the verdict. They reasoned that if an Indigenous
woman could protect her property from her husband’s debts, then a white
woman ought to be able to do the same. Two years later, Mississippi became
the first state to pass a law that guaranteed all married women a right to own
property separate from their husbands.
About the Resources
This is the first U.S. law that guaranteed women the right to own property
separate from their husbands. Most of the law focuses on the right to inherit
and transfer enslaved people. This is because gifting enslaved people was the
easiest way for parents to pass wealth to their children before the Civil War.
This law makes several references to upholding coverture. This indicates that
the legislators were willing to give women some rights to protect family
property but were not advancing the cause of women’s equality.
Vocabulary
• Chickasaw: The Indigenous community that originally inhabited territory
that stretched across modern-day Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and
Kentucky. Today, the Chickasaw nation is headquartered in Oklahoma
• Civil War: U.S. war from 1861 to 1865 in which the Northern and Southern
states fought over the question of whether the practice of slavery should
continue in the U.S.
• coverture: A common-law practice where women fell under the legal and
economic oversight of their husbands upon marriage
• Mexican-American War: 1846—1848 war between U.S. and Mexico over
control of lands along their shared border
Discussion Questions
• What right does this law grant to women? Why is this an
important moment in women’s history?
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Re-Assessing the Married Women’s
Property Acts
Carole Shammas
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, literally every state in
the United States passed laws known as the married women’s property
acts or adopted a community property system. Around the same time, the
British Parliament and the Canadian Provinces approved similar acts.1
Altogether these revisions represented the most substantial change in
women’s legal status in 700 years of the common law, and contemporary
feminists considered the legal changes to be a great victory for the movement. In certain respects, this legislation was analogous to the emancipation proclamations and related acts concerning enslaved persons. Neither
resulted in equality. Wives did not suddenly become the equals of- their
husbands any more than freed African Americans became the equals of
their former masters. But the legal changes, to a great extent, released both
from the patriarchal authority of master and husband and set up new
relationships between themselves and the state. Unlike emancipation,
however, neither the married women’s property acts nor the establishment
of community property law has found a place in the pantheon of important
historical events. Nor have the past two decades of research in women’s
history done much to boost their reputation. In this paper, I would like to
focus upon these acts in the United States, how they have been evaluated
by historians and why we might want to reconsider this evaluation both
in respect to women’s history and the history of American society in
general.
A Brief Description of the Married Women’s Property Acts
and the Community Property System
Under the common law, as it was transferred to the colonies in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a woman’s personalty (all property
except land and improvements) went to her husband when she married,
and her realty came under his control. She became a feme covert. Ordinarily
she had no need to write a will, because her personal property already
belonged to her husband, and even after her death he continued to possess
her real estate for life, a practice known as curtesy, provided a child had
been born of the marriage. Afterwards it automatically devolved upon her
descendants. She could not name guardians for her children and might
even be excluded from guardianship by her husband’s will. Nor could she
© 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. ι (Spring)
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Journal of Women’s History
Spring
sue in court without her husband. In exchange, the common law obligated
a husband to maintain his wife in necessities suitable to his rank in life and
guaranteed her, if she survived him, a lifetime dower right of one third of
the profits from realty he owned during the marriage. Aside from this one
obligation, he could do anything he pleased with his estate, which included
all of the personalty his wife had brought to the marriage as well as the
profits from her realty. In many English jurisdictions, dower had at one
time included a one-third share of personalty forever. During the seven-
teenth century, however, Parliamentary statutes reduced dower to just the
realty share for life and all colonies except Maryland followed suit. Once
a widow, the woman regained her legal persona of feme sole, but her
property situation depended upon what her husband left her in his will,
or, if she renounced that, her dower.2
The only way a married woman could keep property out of the
clutches of her husband was to resort to an equitable settlement. Equity
jurisprudence, dispensed through the Chancery court, drew on innovative
principles and procedures foreign to the common law but in some respects
familiar to the Roman law of continental Europe.3 In the area of spousal
property rights, Chancery recognized the concept of married women’s
separate property. From the late sixteenth century on, wealthy English
women and their families found that under certain circumstances Chan-
cery would uphold the right of a woman, most often a wife separated from
her husband or a widow about to be remarried, to have a separate estate
that was controlled by a trustee rather than her spouse. Although the exact
reasons for the emergence of equitable separate estates remain obscure,
they, along with the strict family settlement, seem to have developed in
response to Tudor-Stuart legislation (principally the Statute of Uses, the
Statute on Wills, and intestacy statutes) and common law court decisions
that eliminated the traditional methods of protecting brides’ dowries and
restricted the kinds of property subject to widows’ dower. As a result, the
bride and her lineage group needed new means to safeguard the property
she brought to a marriage.4
Slowly, colonies in America adopted some procedures from equity,
including provisions for married women’s separate estates.5 A husband
had to agree to make a settlement, either prior or during marriage, that
transferred property to trustees who held it for her benefit. Trustees could
have a great deal of power or none depending on how the settlement was
drawn up. Also, fathers or first husbands could by will or deed shelter
property from possible depredation by their sons-in-law or their widows’
second husbands by creating a separate estate in equity. On the other hand,
there were not to be any secret trusts about which husbands had no
knowledge.
1994
Carole Shammas
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Beginning in the 1830s, during that decade’s banking crisis, a few state
legislatures in the U.S. introduced laws protecting certain types of property
a wife brought to a marriage from her husband’s creditors. Soon women’s
rights advocates organized around the issue, and the legislation became
more comprehensive. Between the 1840s and 1880s, most states passed a
series of acts that went beyond debt protection and recognized the right of
married women to manage, enjoy the profits, sell, and will personal and
real property that they had owned prior to marriage or had been given or
inherited from a third party during marriage. Later versions often added
earnings from wage work or businesses to what could be considered
women’s separate property. Some states also included in the legislation
safeguards against husbands unilaterally preventing their wives from
being guardians of their children.6
Seven of the jurisdictions that entered the union or organized as
territories in the mid-nineteenth century rejected altogether the common
law arrangement for family property and adopted the community prop-
erty system favored in many western European countries and Mexico. This
system allowed for separate property but also gave the wife a claim to one
half of the property she and her husband acquired during their marriage.
While married, the husband managed this conjugal fund, but he could not
will away his wife’s half. This system dispensed with dower and curtesy,
a big attraction to many legislators who disliked the way these lifetime
interests interfered with the alienation of property. Women had the right
to will their separate property and in some states one half of the community
property as well. Neither spouse had a claim on the other’s separate
property, if their mate chose to will it to someone else.7
It is important to note that in neither common law nor community
property states did wives possess the legal right to control the assets that
accumulated during marriage due to their performance of household
services for other family members. That authority was the husband’s.
Equal control and ownership of the conjugal fund and its appreciation have
continued to be important issues for feminists today.
The Current Assessment of the Married Women’s Property Acts
The most efficient way to judge the historiographical fate of past
events is to consult current American history textbooks. In surveying seven
popular texts published in the last few years, I discovered that only one
has a separate index item for married women’s property acts.8 Most texts
discuss the legal disabilities of married women without using the term feme
covert or indicating that a whole system of law had developed around that
status. And none reveal that literally every state radically altered coverture
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