Domestic Relations and Law

The laws of marriage, divorce, property transmission and child custody, made by men, have powerfully conditioned women's lives. In the tradition of the English common law a woman by marrying, buried her own legal status in that of her husband: in law she could neither own property, sue in court, or even write a will of her own. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth these legal "disabilities" as women who crusaded to repeal to them called them, were gradually changed, so that by the time women became voters in 1920, the law regarded women, even married women, as individuals similar to men in most although not all ways. This volume includes articles which treat women's legal status and change over time in women's interaction with the legal structures of marriage, divorce and property.