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Married Women Property Acts

by Cheyenne Cartwright

Overview

In most of the United States before the Civil War, married women had no control over personal or real property, wages or their inheritances. Anything a woman owned became her husband's property at the moment of marriage, as did everything she acquired thereafter. According to the Law Library of the Library of Congress, the first real protections U.S. women achieved in this arena came in 1848, when the state of New York passed the Married Women's Property Act.
Property Laws Prior to 1848

The basis of property laws in the United States was English law, which dictated that married women had no rights to any property that they brought to a marriage, nor to any they acquired thereafter, whether by their own labor or through inheritance. As early as 1809, however, Connecticut enacted legislation that permitted women to write wills dispensing their property as they saw fit, without their husband's consent. By the 1850s, most of the rest of the states had passed similar laws.

The Married Women's Property Act of 1848

The New York property law decreed that any property women owned when they married, and any income they derived from it, such as rent or profits from selling it, belonged to them rather than to their husbands, and could not be seized to pay their husbands' debts. Furthermore, property a woman received as a gift belonged to her, as did the proceeds from it. The law applied both to women who married after the law was enacted and women who had married earlier, though the latter could still be held liable for their husbands' debts under some circumstances. Most of the legislation passed at the state level after 1848 to protect married women's property rights drew on the New York statute as a model.
The Homestead Act of 1862

This act of Congress specifically noted that men and women could claim property under the provisions of the act. The federal law influenced the way that some state property laws were written and applied.
Community Property Laws

Around the turn of the century, some state legislatures began passing laws to protect married women's rights to their property, but other states kept in force older laws or parts of them that limited these rights. Influenced by Spanish and Mexican laws, some western states enacted laws that made everything a couple acquired after their marriage community property. but in many cases, the wife had no power over the property unless her husband died.
The English Married Women's Property Law of 1882

Not until 1882 did the British Parliament pass a law protecting the rights of married women to property they inherited after they married. Their rights to property they brought to the marriage or acquired thereafter weren't fully protected until 1893, when a new Married Women's Property Law guaranteed that all property women possessed upon marriage or acquired by inheritance or their own labor remained theirs to control.