In Her Own Name : : The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage / / Sara Chatfield.

• VerfasserIn: Chatfield, Sara,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Long before American women had the right to vote, states dramatically transformed their status as economic citizens. In the early nineteenth century, a married woman had hardly any legal existence apart from her husband. By the twentieth, state-level statutes, constitutional provisions, and court rulings had granted married women a host of protections relating to ownership and control of property. Why did powerful men extend these rights during a period when women had so little political sway?In Her Own Name explores the origins and consequences of laws guaranteeing married women’s property rights, focusing on the people and institutions that shaped them. Sara Chatfield demonstrates that the motives of male elites included personal interests, benefits to the larger economy, and bolstering state power. She shows that married women’s property rights could serve varied political goals across regions and eras, from temperance to debt relief to settlement of the West. State legislatures, constitutional conventions, and courts expanded these rights incrementally, and laws spread across the country without national-level coordination.Chatfield emphasizes that the reform of married women’s economic rights rested on exclusionary foundations, including protecting slavery and encouraging settler colonialism. Although some women benefited from property reforms, many others saw their rights stripped away by the same processes. Drawing on a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, In Her Own Name sheds new light on the place of women in the fitful democratization of the United States.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- CHAPTER ONE Life Under Coverture and How It Changed -- CHAPTER TWO Married Women’s Rights Reforms in American Political Development -- CHAPTER THREE Social Movements and State Power Reform in State Legislatures -- CHAPTER FOUR Constitutional Conventions as Key Reform Moments -- CHAPTER FIVE Decentralized Reform and Policy Diffusion -- CHAPTER SIX Courts as Collaborators and Catalysts -- Conclusion -- Methods Appendix -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index