In Her Own Name : The Politics of Women’s Rights Before Suffrage

Co-Winner, 2024 V.O. Key Award, Southern Political Science Association 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. "Before women had the right to vote in the United States, states passed a series of laws dramatically transforming their rights as economic citizens. Over the course of the 1800s and early 1900s, married women gained a whole host of new rights relating to their ownership and control of property. These reforms were enacted before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the constitutional right to vote, and most were passed before suffrage laws in the states. Why did men extend new economic rights to married women during a time when women had so little political power-and no power to pressure their legislators at the ballot box? Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, this book explores this puzzle of how and why women's economic rights expanded before they had the vote. Within each state, several institutions-state legislatures, state courts, and state constitutional conventions- interacted and built off one another to expand rights incrementally, usually over decades. And these laws spread between states without national coordination by Congress or the Supreme Court. Male political actors saw women's rights as being in their own interest, but these interests varied dramatically across different states. Some state legislators passed these laws to hang a social safety net for families in debt; some to attract women to Western states or to protect family assets from being squandered by unworthy sons-in-law; and some to simplify credit markets in a growing commercial economy. The mix of sometimes-conflicting motivations behind these reforms led to ambivalence among lawmakers and a rights expansion that was ultimately limited in important ways"-- Provided by publisher