Property Rights
During the 19th century some women in the United States and Britain began to challenge laws that denied them the right to their property once they married. Under the common law doctrine of coverture husbands gained control of their wives' real estate and wages. Beginning in the 1840s, state legislatures in the United States and the British Parliament began passing statutes that protected women's property from their husbands and their husbands' creditors. These laws were known as the Married Women's Property Acts. Courts in the 19th-century United States also continued to require privy examinations of married women who sold their property. A privy examination was a practice in which a married woman who wished to sell her property had to be separately examined by a judge or justice of the peace outside of the presence of her husband and asked if her husband was pressuring her into signing the document.
Read more about this topic: Women's Rights
Famous quotes containing the words property and/or rights:
“I would gladly chastise those who represent things as different from what they are. Those who steal property or make counterfeit money are punished, and those ought to be still more severely dealt with who steal away or falsify the good name of a prince.”
—Elizabeth I (1533–1603)
“She, too, would now swim down the river of matrimony with a beautiful name, and a handle to it, as the owner of a fine family property. Women’s rights was an excellent doctrine to preach, but for practice could not stand the strain of such temptation.”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)