Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. i-iv i
2. Contents v
3. Series Preface vii
4. Introduction ix
5. Domestic Relations and Law
6. Women and Property in South Carolina: The Evidence from Marriage Settlements, 1730 to 1830 3
7. “Smiling Through Her Tears”: Ante-Bellum Southern Women and Divorce 34
8. The Political and Civil Status of Women in Georgia, 1783–1860 56
9. “An Act for the Relief of Females...”: Divorce and the Changing Legal Status of Women in Tennessee, 1796–1860, Part I 80
10. “An Act far the Relief of Females...”: Divorce and the Changing Legal Status of Women in Tennessee Part II 102
11. The Mississippi Married Women's Property Act of 1839 117
12. Invisible Women: The Legal Fiction of Marital Unity in Nineteenth-Century America 132
13. Married Women’s Property Law: 1800–1850 153
14. Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women 220
15. Apart but Not Adrift: Wives, Divorce, and Independence in California, 1850–1890 242
16. Law, Sex, Cruelty, and Divorce in Victorian America, 1840–1900 261
17. Who Gets the Child? Custody, Guardianship, and the Rise of a Judicial Patriarchy in Nineteenth-Century America 286
18. Late Nineteenth Century Married Women’s Property Law: Reception of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts by Courts and Legislatures 312
19. Reynolds v. United States: Nineteenth-Century Forms of Marriage and the Status of Women 345
20. Divorce in the Progressive Era 376
21. The Pressure to Provide: Class, Consumerism, and Divorce in Urban America, 1880–1920 391
22. Copyright Information 405
23. Index 409