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Women and the Law of Property in Early America
In this first comprehensive study of women's property rights in early America, Marylynn Salmon discusses the effect of formal rules of law on women's lives. By focusing on such areas such as conveyancing, contracts, divorce, separate estates, and widows' provisions, Salmon presents a full picture of women's legal rights from 1750 to 1830. Salmon shows that the law assumes women would remain dependent and subservient after marriage. She documents the legal rights of women prior to the Revolution and traces a gradual but steady extension of the ability of wives to own and control property during the decades following the Revolution. The forces of change in colonial and early national law were various, but Salmon believes ideological considerations were just as important as economic ones. Women did not all fare equally under the law. In this illuminating survey of the jurisdictions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, Salmon shows regional variations in the law that affected women's autonomous control over property. She demonstrates the importance of understanding the effects of formal law on women' s lives in order to analyze the wider social context of women's experience.
In nineteenth-century Canada, women's property was transferred to their husbands upon marriage. The common-law rule disadvantaged women, particularly those abandoned by their husbands. This article chronicles the development of married women's property rights in the nineteenth century. The introduction of legislation that began to reform this field of law occurred in three waves: 1) enactments applicable to financially desperate married women, 2) protective measures insulating women's property from their husbands and their husbands' creditors, and 3) laws adopted from British statute, aimed at giving women more control over their property. Married women's gains in property rights during the 1800s were initiated by provincial legislatures with varying motivations; paternalism, protection of women, desire to increase women's status, or reflexive veneration for the imperial British Parliament. Judges were hostile toward laws that protected women's property from their husbands, believing such laws posed a danger to the Canadian family. They conceived of the Canadian family as a necessarily patriarchal hierarchical structure, not as a partnership of equals. Most judges deliberately tried to debilitate the legislation by narrowly interpreting the scope of married women's rights to property and freedom of contract. Judicial conservatism was eventually overturned by legislative amendment. While the nineteenth century saw great gains in women's formal property rights, men continued to have markedly greater access to wealth and resources.
Essay on the legal status of women in British law and her own personal experience with leaving her husband in 1836 and the legal aftermath. Pages 18-21 discuss legal cases involving enslaved persons in British colonies and the United States.