Is It Immoral for a Widower to Marry Again in the 1800
State law rather than federal law governed women'due south rights in the early commonwealth. The authorization of state law meant that much depended upon where a woman lived and the detail social circumstances in her region of the country. The disparity in standards tin peradventure be seen most dramatically in the experiences of African American women. In the North, where states abolished slavery later on the Revolution, black women gained rights to marry, to have custody of their children, and to own property. On paper at to the lowest degree, their rights were identical to those of white women. In the slaveholding South, lawmakers continued to deny enslaved workers these basic human rights. But even in the South, a rising number of freed black women theoretically enjoyed the aforementioned privileges under the law equally white women. However, racial prejudice against both black and Native American women made information technology difficult to ensure these rights in practice.
In every country, the legal status of free women depended upon marital status. Unmarried women, including widows, were chosen "femes soles," or "women lonely." They had the legal right to live where they pleased and to support themselves in any occupation that did not require a license or a higher caste restricted to males. Single women could enter into contracts, buy and sell real manor, or accumulate personal belongings, which was called personalty. It consisted of everything that could exist moved—cash, stocks and bonds, livestock, and, in the South, slaves. So long as they remained unmarried, women could sue and be sued, write wills, serve as guardians, and act as executors of estates. These rights were a continuation of the colonial legal tradition. But the revolutionary emphasis on equality brought some of import changes in women'due south inheritance rights. State lawmakers everywhere abolished primogeniture and the tradition of double shares of a parent'southward estate, inheritance customs that favored the eldest son. Instead, equal inheritance for all children became the rule—a big gain for daughters.
Matrimony changed women's legal condition dramatically. When women married, equally the vast bulk did, they still had legal rights but no longer had autonomy. Instead, they constitute themselves in positions of almost total dependency on their husbands which the police force called coverture. Equally the English jurist William Blackstone famously put it in his Commentaries on English language Law (1765–1769):
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the matrimony, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.
Coverture was based on the assumption that a family functioned best if the male head of a household controlled all of its avails. Every bit a outcome, a married adult female could non own holding independently of her married man unless they had signed a special contract called a spousal relationship settlement. Such contracts were rare and even illegal in some parts of the country. In the absence of a split estate, all personalty a woman brought to her spousal relationship or earned during union, including wages, became her husband's. He could manage it or give it away, as he chose, without consulting her.
This sounds bad, and it was. But ane dominion worked to mitigate some of the worst effects of coverture. A married adult female had the right to be maintained in a fashion commensurate with her husband's social status. If he refused to provide for her accordingly, she could sue and win back up from the courts. While waiting for the court's judgment, she was permitted to sew charges at local stores and taverns—and her married man had to pay for them. Judges consistently practical this rule, called the doctrine of necessities, in gild to forestall men from neglecting their wives. But the courts could not terminate husbands from gambling or making bad investments. Women had no protection when their husbands proved irresponsible. If creditors pursued a married man for debts, his wife was entitled to keep only the blank necessities of life. This was normally defined as 2 dresses (so she would have one to wear while the other was being washed), cooking utensils, and a bed.
Women's rights to real holding—the lands and buildings that constituted almost wealth in the early national menstruation—were more extensive than their rights to personalty. A husband could not sell or mortgage the realty his wife brought to their marriage without her consent. He could apply it, but he could not convey it considering a woman'southward real estate, by and large inherited from her father, was meant to stay in the family and descend through her to her children. A wife also had important rights to the real property that her husband brought to the marriage or purchased afterward. He could not sell or mortgage information technology unless she signed a statement signifying her free consent, which was recorded with the deed. Few mortgagors or buyers would enter into an agreement without the wife's consent. They knew that she retained her correct to exist maintained past the property in the effect of her married man'south death, even if he died insolvent. Courts were careful to ensure that a wife signed a conveyance of her ain gratis will and not because of pressure from her hubby. A court officer questioned her apart from him to confirm that she actually agreed to the sale or mortgage.
One of the most important rights of a married woman was dower, which was designed to provide her with support during widowhood. It consisted of a life estate in one-tertiary of the married man'south real property if in that location were children and one one-half if there were non. A "life estate" did not mean actual ownership of the property. It was meant only to provide for the wife equally her husband would have done had he lived, under a legal organisation that recognized her position of dependency within the family. When a widow died, her dower lands descended automatically to her husband'due south heirs or to his creditors. A solvent husband could exit his widow more than dower if he chose to. He could even go out her his entire estate in fee simple (absolute buying). But he could non leave her less. Most couples relied on dower as their standard for how much to leave.
Dower was a legal tradition carried over from colonial days. This and other rules about married women'due south property rights were meant to support the family as a unit. They worked reasonably well in an economic system based on landed wealth, under which families typically stayed in 1 identify and rarely sold or mortgaged their farms. They did not work as well, withal, in a society like the rapidly expanding and industrializing nineteenth-century Us, where lands inverse easily frequently and where there was growth in personal property likewise equally country.
Under these new circumstances, the old arrangement of property police force faltered. It failed to give acceptable protection to women and, at the same time, denied them the power to safeguard their own interests. In recognition of this dilemma, states began to pass married women's property acts in the antebellum decades. These acts gave wives the same legal rights as single women with regard to their estates and wages. It was piecemeal legislation, enacted reluctantly past male lawmakers who would accept preferred to continue women dependent within the family. All the same the lawmakers recognized that these reforms were essential in a backer economy based on movable wealth.
Political rights were a role of control over property for men in the republic, but gender alone was the basis for women's exclusion from voting or holding part. Simply put, men with property had the right to vote in the early national catamenia but women, no matter how wealthy, did not, even though women paid the same taxes as men. The reasoning backside this bigotry rested on the assumption that married women were liable to coercion by their husbands; if a wife voted, legislators argued, it meant that a human being cast 2 ballots. As one homo put information technology, "How can a fair one refuse her lover?" Yet unmarried women were also denied suffrage, a clear sign that more than was at stake than the power of a husband to influence his wife's choices at the polls.
Blatantly discriminatory attitudes kept lawmakers from giving women the vote. They did not want to share their political power with daughters, mothers, and wives, just every bit they did non desire to share it with freed black men or immigrants. This pattern can be seen clearly in New Jersey, the one land where women with holding were immune to vote after the Revolution. In 1807 legislators took this right away—not merely from women but from blackness men and aliens every bit well. As it turned out, discrimination against women in the area of the franchise lasted the longest of whatever disadvantaged group, at least on paper.
American independence brought women greater freedom from husbands who were abusive, neglectful, or adulterous. In colonial society, divorce was about impossible under English precedent, just all of the new states recognized the need to end unhappy marriages. The option of appropriate remedies varied considerably, however. Some states, particularly in the South, only allowed separate residence with alimony (called divorce from bed and board). Other states granted absolute divorce with the right of the innocent party to remarry. In matters of divorce, social and religious values affected the laws in different parts of the country. The conservatism of divorce laws in the southern states, for example, was probably related to slavery: information technology was difficult for lawmakers to grant women absolute divorces considering of their husbands' adulterous relationships with slaves. Liberal New England laws, in contrast, stemmed from a longstanding Puritan conventionalities that it was ameliorate for unhappy couples to split and remarry than to be joined forever in a state of discord and temptation to sin.
Kid-custody rights also inverse afterward the Revolution. The courts were increasingly willing to featherbed colonial precedents that favored men in custody disputes. Instead, they placed young children and daughters (although not sons) under the care of mothers. These reforms reflect the rising importance of the gender-based ideology of separate spheres, which gave women moral preeminence in the private sphere of the home and men supremacy in the marketplace and politics. Women would use the concept of moral maternity to smashing advantage in their struggle for social justice over the next century.
Marylynn Salmon is the author of Women and the Law of Property in Early America (1989) and The Limits of Independence: American Women, 1760–1800 (1998).
Source: https://ap.gilderlehrman.org/essay/legal-status-women-1776%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C1830
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