Reforming the married state: women and property after the Married Women's Property Acts, 1870-1935
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Abstract
The 1870 and 1882 Married Women’s Property Acts’ passage constituted a significant change in married women’s legal status in Britain. The Property Acts granted married women independent property rights, thereby overturning much of the English common law of coverture—the doctrine that a married woman had no legal identity independent of her husband. Married women’s property rights, consequently, introduced a fundamental tension into Britain’s patriarchal social order, long predicated on a married woman’s legal non-existence and economic dependence.
This dissertation argues that the social and legal contradictions the Property Acts engendered compelled Britons to re-imagine their society: from one organized around an independent, property-owning male head of household to one comprised of men and women, married or single, with claims to individual rights. It follows social commentators, judges, feminists, MPs, and government officials who tried to define the Act’s scope via debates in the press, the courts, the halls of Parliament, and offices of Inland Revenue. Recovering these debates reveals two understandings of the Property Acts: for some, a paternalistic law that protected poor women’s property from idle husbands; for feminists, a symbol of a married woman’s independence. Overall, this study marks a transitional moment for British society, as these competing arguments undermined the dominant Victorian-era separate spheres ideology and required Britons re-negotiate husbands and wives’ respective obligations to each other, to society, and to the state.
“Reforming the Married State” deploys a trove of sources—newspapers, periodicals, suffragists’ papers, Parliamentary debates, and government papers—that reframe the Property Acts within histories of gender, liberalism and capitalism. While scholars acknowledge the Property Acts’ passage constituted a significant political victory for the women’s movement, they commonly regard women’s Parliamentary enfranchisement in 1918 as the impetus for subsequent economic and social reforms. As a result, the Property Acts are overlooked in social and economic histories of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. Re-centering the Property Acts illustrates the breadth of debate the Property Acts inspired, as legal changes to women’s rights in marriage reverberated through British social and economic life.