Women and The Law

Barbara Leigh Smith was moved to write her pamphlet by cases such as that of Caroline Norton, who experienced most of the rigours of the law as it could apply to married women, and who challenged the law because of her own tribulations. While the Common Law gave the whole of a wife’s personal property to her husband, the Courts of Equity, when he proceeded to recover property in right of his wife, obliged him to make a settlement of some portion of it upon her, as long as she was virtuous and unprovided for. Lawyers argued that the ability to palm off a bastard child on a husband, given to Englishwomen by law, was extraordinary and unequalled even in Scotland; it was the case that if a husband could not prove his wife’s adultery, any child she had was assumed to be his however improbable the circumstances of the birth.

Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law