UNJUST LAWS FOR WOMEN.
Up to about the middle of the nineteenth century, the maxims of the common law of England relating to the rights and responsibilities of married women were in force in nearly all the states of the Union. This was true especially in the state of New York. They were exceedingly stringent in their character, and confined her, so far as related to her property rights, within exceedingly narrow limits. Indeed, in some respects they might well be regarded as brutal. They merged the legal being of the wife in her husband. Without him, and apart from him, she could hold no property, make no contracts, nor even exercise control over her children. If she earned money by whatever means, she could not collect it. Her time and her earnings belonged to her husband; and her children, when above the age of infancy, could be taken from her by will or otherwise and committed to the charge of strangers. On the decease of the husband, the personal property acquired through their joint efforts and industry passed at once to his heirs, through the legal administration of his estate; while the wife was turned off with a bare life estate in one-third of the real property standing in his name at the time of his decease.
The gross injustice of these laws began to excite attention soon after the adoption of the new constitution in the state of New York, in 1846. The first step towards their modification was taken in the legislature of 1844-5, when certain recognitions of the property rights of married women were enacted into laws; and in other states attention about that time began to be turned in the same direction. These were the beginning of the series of laws since enacted in nearly all the states as well as in the dominions and provinces of the British Empire, by which the old and absurd and barbarous features of the old common law of England applicable to married women have been to a large extent abrogated. But this result has been the work of years of earnest thought, earnest labor and earnest devotion to the principles of right and justice, upon which it is our boast that all our laws are based.