Wives & Property
Wives & Property

Author: Lee Holcombe

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1983-12-15

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1487590180

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In the 1870s Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched by a young thief in London. When he appeared in court to testify, she heard the young man charged with 'stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £1 18s 6d the property of Henry Fawcett.' Long after the episode she recalled: 'I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.' The English common law which deprived married women of the right to own and control property had far-reaching consequences for the status of women not only in other areas of law and in family life but also in education, and employment, and public life. To win reform of the married women's property law, feminism as an organized movement appeared in the 1850s, and the final success of the campaigns for reform in 1882 was one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian women's movement. Dr Holcombe explores the story of the reform campaign in the context of its time, giving particular attention to the many important men and women who worked for reform and to the debates on the subject which contributed greatly to the formulation of a philosophy of feminism.

Women and Property
Women and Property

Author: Amy Louise Erickson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-11-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1134785585

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This ground-breaking book reveals the economic reality of ordinary women between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. Drawing on little-known sources, Amy Louise Erickson reconstructs day-to-day lives, showing how women owned, managed and inherited property on a scale previously unrecognised. Her complex and fascinating research, which contrasts the written laws with the actual practice, completely revises the traditional picture of women's economic status in pre-industrial England. Women and Property is essential reading for anyone interested in women, law and the past.

Tennessee Women
Tennessee Women

Author: Beverly Greene Bond

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0820347558

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The second volume of Tennessee Women: Their Lives and Times contains sixteen essays on Tennessee women in the forefront of the political, economic, and cultural history of the state and assesses the national and sometimes international scope of their influence. The essays examine women's lives in the broad sweep of nineteenth- and twentieth-century history in Tennessee and reenvision the state's past by placing them at the center of the historical stage and examining their experiences in relation to significant events. Together, volumes 1 and 2 cover women's activities from the early 1700s to the late 1900s. Volume 2 looks at antebellum issues of gender, race, and class; the impact of the Civil War on women's lives; parades and public celebrations as venues for displaying and challenging gender ideals; female activism on racial and gender issues; the impact of state legislation on marital rights; and the place of women in particular religious organizations. Together these essays reorient our views of women as agents of change in Tennessee history. Contributors: Beverly Greene Bond on African American women and slavery in Tennessee; Zanice Bond on Mildred Bond Roxborough and the NAACP; Frances Wright Breland on women's marital rights after the 1913 Married Women's Property Rights Act; Margaret Caffrey on Lide Meriwether; Gary T. Edwards on antebellum female plainfolk; Sarah Wilkerson Freeman on Tennessee's audacious white feminists, 1825-1910; M. Sharon Herbers on Lilian Wyckoff Johnson's legacy; Laura Mammina on Union soldiers and Confederate women in Middle Tennessee; Ann Youngblood Mulhearn on women, faith, and social justice in Memphis, 1950-1968; Kelli B. Nelson on East Tennessee United Daughters of the Confederacy, 1914-1931; Russell Olwell on the "Secret City" women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, during World War II; Mary Ellen Pethel on education and activism in Nashville's African American community, 1870-1940; Cynthia Sadler on Memphis Mardi Gras, Cotton Carnival, and Cotton Makers' Jubilee; Sarah L. Silkey on Ida B. Wells; Antoinette G. van Zelm on women, emancipation, and freedom celebrations; Elton H. Weaver III on Church of God in Christ women in Tennessee, early 1900s-1950s.

Familial Properties
Familial Properties

Author: Nhung Tuyet Tran

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0824874900

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Familial Properties is the first full-length history of Vietnamese gender relations in the precolonial period. Author Nhung Tuyet Tran shows how, despite the bias in law and practice of a patrilineal society based on primogeniture, some women were able to manipulate the system to their own advantage. Women succeeded in taking pragmatic advantage of socioeconomic turmoil during a time of war and chaos to acquire wealth and, to some extent, control what happened to their property. Drawing from legal, literary, and religious sources written in the demotic script, classical Chinese, and European languages, Tran argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, state and local communities produced laws and morality codes limiting women’s participation in social life. Then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic and political turmoil led the three competing states—the Mac, Trinh, and Nguyen—to increase their military service demands, producing labor shortages in the fields and markets of the countryside. Women filled the vacuum left by their brothers, husbands, and fathers, and as they worked the lands and tended the markets, they accumulated monetary capital. To protect that capital, they circumvented local practice and state law guaranteeing patrilineal inheritance rights by soliciting the cooperation of male leaders. In exchange for monetary and landed donations to the local community, these women were elected to become spiritual patrons of the community whose souls would be forever preserved by collective offering. By tracing how the women, local leaders, and court elites negotiated gender models to demarcate their authority, Tran demonstrates that despite the Confucian ethos of the times, survival strategies were able to subvert gender norms and create new cultural models. Gender, thus, as a signifier of power relations, was central to the relationship between state and local communities in early modern Vietnam. Rich and detailed in its use of documentary evidence from a range of archives, this work will be of great interest to scholars of Southeast Asian history and the comparative study of gender.

Making Home Work
Making Home Work

Author: Jane E. Simonsen

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-12-08

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0807877263

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During the westward expansion of America, white middle-class ideals of home and domestic work were used to measure differences between white and Native American women. Yet the vision of America as "home" was more than a metaphor for women's stake in the process of conquest--it took deliberate work to create and uphold. Treating white and indigenous women's struggles as part of the same history, Jane E. Simonsen argues that as both cultural workers and domestic laborers insisted upon the value of their work to "civilization," they exposed the inequalities integral to both the nation and the household. Simonsen illuminates discussions about the value of women's work through analysis of texts and images created by writers, women's rights activists, reformers, anthropologists, photographers, field matrons, and Native American women. She argues that women such as Caroline Soule, Alice Fletcher, E. Jane Gay, Anna Dawson Wilde, and Angel DeCora called upon the rhetoric of sentimental domesticity, ethnographic science, public display, and indigenous knowledge as they sought to make the gendered and racial order of the nation visible through homes and the work performed in them. Focusing on the range of materials through which domesticity was produced in the West, Simonsen integrates new voices into the study of domesticity's imperial manifestations.

Wife to Widow
Wife to Widow

Author: Bettina Bradbury

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 522

ISBN-13: 0774819537

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This monumental study of two generations of women who married either before or after the Patriote rebellions of 1837-38 explores the meaning of the transition from wife to widowhood in early nineteenth-century Montreal. Bettina Bradbury weaves together the individual biographies of twenty women, against the backdrop of collective genealogies of over 500, to offer new insights into the law, politics, demography, religion, and domestic life of the time. She shows how women from all walks of life interacted with and shaped Montreal's culture, customs, and institutions, even as they laboured under the shifting conditions of patriarchy. Wife to Widow provides a rare window into the significance of marriage and widowhood.

Women and the Law of Property in Early America
Women and the Law of Property in Early America

Author: Marylynn Salmon

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2016-08-01

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1469620448

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In this first comprehensive study of women's property rights in early America, Marylynn Salmon discusses the effect of formal rules of law on women's lives. By focusing on such areas such as conveyancing, contracts, divorce, separate estates, and widows' provisions, Salmon presents a full picture of women's legal rights from 1750 to 1830. Salmon shows that the law assumes women would remain dependent and subservient after marriage. She documents the legal rights of women prior to the Revolution and traces a gradual but steady extension of the ability of wives to own and control property during the decades following the Revolution. The forces of change in colonial and early national law were various, but Salmon believes ideological considerations were just as important as economic ones. Women did not all fare equally under the law. In this illuminating survey of the jurisdictions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, Salmon shows regional variations in the law that affected women's autonomous control over property. She demonstrates the importance of understanding the effects of formal law on women' s lives in order to analyze the wider social context of women's experience.

Leftover Women
Leftover Women

Author: Leta Hong Fincher

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-11-02

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1350323659

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A China Books Review Best China Book of 2023 Leta Hong Fincher's landmark book Leftover Women shone a light on the resurgence of gender inequality in 21st-century China. Ten years on, women in China continue to experience a dramatic rolling back of rights and gains in the increasingly patriarchal political climate of the Xi Jinping era. Leftover Women explores the structural discrimination against women and the broader problems with China's economy, politics, and development that lie behind it. This updated edition includes a new preface exploring developments in China in the 10 years since the book's original publication, including the new "three child policy", the growth in online feminist and LGBTQ activism and the state's increasingly repressive moves against dissent.