"Before women had the right to vote in the United States, states passed a series of laws dramatically transforming their rights as economic citizens. Over the course of the 1800s and early 1900s, married women gained a whole host of new rights relating to their ownership and control of property. These reforms were enacted before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the constitutional right to vote, and most were passed before suffrage laws in the states. Why did men extend new economic rights to ...
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"Before women had the right to vote in the United States, states passed a series of laws dramatically transforming their rights as economic citizens. Over the course of the 1800s and early 1900s, married women gained a whole host of new rights relating to their ownership and control of property. These reforms were enacted before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the constitutional right to vote, and most were passed before suffrage laws in the states. Why did men extend new economic rights to married women during a time when women had so little political power-and no power to pressure their legislators at the ballot box? Through a mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, this book explores this puzzle of how and why women's economic rights expanded before they had the vote. Within each state, several institutions-state legislatures, state courts, and state constitutional conventions- interacted and built off one another to expand rights incrementally, usually over decades. And these laws spread between states without national coordination by Congress or the Supreme Court. Male political actors saw women's rights as being in their own interest, but these interests varied dramatically across different states. Some state legislators passed these laws to hang a social safety net for families in debt; some to attract women to Western states or to protect family assets from being squandered by unworthy sons-in-law; and some to simplify credit markets in a growing commercial economy. The mix of sometimes-conflicting motivations behind these reforms led to ambivalence among lawmakers and a rights expansion that was ultimately limited in important ways"--
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