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

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Life Under Coverture and How It Changed 2. Married Women’s Rights Reforms in American Political Development 3. Social Movements and State Power: Reform in State Legislatures 4. Constitutional Conventions as Key Reform Moments 5. Decentralized Reform and Policy Diffusion 6. Courts as Collaborators and Catalysts Conclusion Methods Appendix Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

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

Review :
Sara Chatfield has brought to American women’s history a unique theoretical and empirical vantage point. Her innovative analysis of emulation and diffusion in constitutional reform sets a new standard in American political development and the politics of gender. Chatfield’s In Her Own Name insightfully explains the process by which rights law can expand and contract based on state interests and illuminates and deepens our understanding of the development of women’s rights. In Her Own Name is important and welcome work. Chatfield tells a fascinating story about the trajectory of married women’s property reform. In doing so, she also contributes to a growing body of political science literature about the importance of understanding state-level political development. In Her Own Name is a compelling investigation of the development of married women's economic citizenship. Chatfield shows how male policy makers used property reform for married women to pursue an array of goals, including land conquest, slavery, temperance, and family needs—and how state-level institutions structured these pursuits.