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

Chatfield, Professor Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0231199678 ISBN 13: 9780231199674

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2023

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Chatfield is assistant professor of political science at the University of Denver.

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231199678
• ISBN 13: 9780231199674
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256