Women’s Property and the Downward Spiral into Fraud: Questioning the Persistent Narrative of Progress in Women’s Legal Status

This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.