Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America

This provocative reassessment of the 19th century American women's movement calls into question its attack on common law traditions.

While the United States was founded on principles of freedom and equality, its legal traditions are based in British common law. In the nineteenth-century, women's rights advocates argued that this led to a contradiction: common law rules concerning property and the status of married women were at odds with the nation's principles. Conventional wisdom sugge...