IN HER OWN NAME: THE POLITICS OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS BEFORE SUFFRAGE by Sara Chatfield. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. pp.256. Paperback $30.00. ISBN: 9780231199674. Hardcover $120. ISBN: 9780231199667.
Reviewed by Kathleen Sullivan. Department of Political Science, Ohio University. Email: sullivak@ohio.edu
In In Her Own Name, Sara Chatfield provides a comprehensive account of married women’s property acts from 1835 to 1920, offering wider lessons for the field of law and politics. At first glance, statutes and state constitutional provisions that allowed married women to exercise economic rights seem to present a classic story of reform. The impetus for these acts, however, was not to liberate women from coverture. The acts were not even a response to women’s rights activism. A simple story of hierarchy fails to capture this experience of women’s inequality and reform.
Employing a multimethod approach, Chatfield does a meticulous job of identifying when states or territories recognized particular rights. Rather than rely on treatises or other secondhand sources, Chatfield returns to state statute books and state constitutional conventions to identify when particular states passed a law that secured a married woman’s property from paying her husband’s debt, or allowed her to control her own earnings or separate estate, to be a sole trader, or to pass along property in her will. Such rights were passed piecemeal, state by state (and territory), between 1835 and 1920. Chatfield is interested in the diffusion of these statutes and constitutional provisions. To test how states borrowed statutory and constitutional language from other states, Chatfield ran a text analysis using plagiarism software to track language and policy adoption across states (Methods Appendix). An event history analysis distinguishes among states, explaining why states passed particular statutes when they did (p. 134). This is a methodological approach never before used in historical studies of married women’s property acts. In Her Own Name will be the go-to book for a comprehensive account of married women’s property acts.
While In Her Own Name joins women’s history scholarship on married women’s property acts, its approach elicits even more contributions to current political science work in law and American political development. The motives for these statutes were seldom for the betterment of married women themselves. The first wave women’s movement soon followed the first state Married Women’s Property Act, peaking in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. Yet married women’s property rights largely were not granted in response to the mobilization of the women’s movement. Instead, state legislatures and constitutional conventions had other reasons for granting those rights. Those other reasons invite us to contend with the role of liberalism in American political development. Rights are not always about improving the conditions of subjugated or excluded people. Rights can be a tool for state actors to achieve other purposes. Chatfield references the scholarship that has reckoned with the limits of rights and the instrumentality of rights in her conclusion, placing her study into analyses of rights in critical race theory, Mary Dudziak’s account (2011) of Cold War civil rights, and other key studies (pp. 171-172). Adding married women’s property acts to this critical scholarship shows that the restricting and granting of rights was a tool for political institutions to accomplish purposes other than liberating women from previous conditions of oppression. Acknowledging rights-restriction and rights-granting as a tool of institutions rather than as an outcome of reform reveals the work that rights can do for the state.
Chatfield highlights the larger economic purposes of married women’s property acts, in which the rights of marital status intersected with racialized policy. Early married women’s property rights allowed married women to own property in enslaved people and allowed husbands to control that human property while preserving it from creditors, contributing to the economic stability of white families (pp. 78-79). Later in the nineteenth century, this tool was used in homestead exemptions which—explicitly or in practice—privileged white migrants (p. 80). In keeping with Emily Zackin’s (2013) work on state constitutions, Chatfield sees married women’s property rights used as positive rights to preserve the stability of white families and, in the aggregate, economic stability overall. In this account, the granting of certain married women’s property acts served the public good, however that public good was defined, and whatever inequalities it included.
By highlighting the role of debt, Chatfield is joining a growing field in American political development that explores the interventions of states into contracts to provide relief for debtors (Zackin 2020); the public-private policies that have made homeownership affordable for some, while maintaining criteria for exclusion of race and gender (Thurston 2018); that reproduce racial inequality in predatory inclusion and bankruptcy practices (Sorelle 2020; Wise 2023). These studies of political economy look to the seemingly small-scale, private relations between debtor and creditor, in which the state and private actors create opportunities for some individuals and abandon others, becoming an avenue for perpetuating and providing new institutional bases for racial inequality. Chatfield gets there by documenting the purposes of married women’s property acts. Adding this historical focus on gender to existing American political development scholarship highlights which institutions have had the authority to shape the debtor-creditor relation. The old common law domestic relations, embedded into American political institutions at the state level, gave state legislators and constitutional conventions a tool to shape property ownership and debtor-creditor relations to serve special interests or protect general stability. Gendered institutions are available as tools of state authority to achieve other purposes.
Political scientists have studied coverture and married women’s property acts (Ritter 2006; Sullivan 2007), pointing to the relation between the common law and the constitutional order. Chatfield brings the history of married women’s property acts more centrally into American political development, providing an account of the ways that law shapes policies. This book should be put into conversation with the many APD scholars who point to the role of marriage and family in state power. Marriage provided a way to erect anti-miscegenation law between the Civil War and the civil rights era (Novkov 2009). State regulation of poor Black families renders Black women’s labor accessible (Alphonso 2020). Marriage has been so useful for public purposes that it can be seen as a political institution (Yamin 2012), yet it continues to be hard to see, because family policies hide in plain sight, with family continuing to be seen as private (Strach 2007). Nevertheless, political science tends to naturalize family and fails to fully consider its political role, in both its legal and political construction and legal and political deployment (Novkov and Nackenoff 2020). Acknowledging marriage as a tool of the state, whether in the antebellum era, after Reconstruction, in the New Deal state, or in the 21st century, indicates that marriage has always been a powerful tool, and it has always been available for state actors to use. The study of marriage is not just about women’s history. It recovers the role of legal status as a tool of the state. Chatfield’s comprehensive approach documents that, while showing how useful married women’s property rights were for varying interests, policies, and public purposes.
REFERENCES:
Alphonso, Gwen. 2020. “Slavery, Neoliberalism, and the Racial Family Policy Logic of Child and Social Welfare.” Columbia Journal of Race and Law 11(3): 471-499.
Dudziak, Mary. 2011. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Novkov, Julie. 2009. Racial Union: Law, Intimacy, and the White State in Alabama, 1865-1954. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Novkov, Julie and Carol Nackenoff, eds. 2020. Stating the Family: New Directions in the Study of American Politics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Ritter, Gretchen. 2006. The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Sorelle, Mallory E. 2020. Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Strach, Patricia. 2007. All in the Family: The Private Roots of American Public Policy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Sullivan, Kathleen S. 2007. Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Thurston, Chloe. 2018. At the Boundaries of Homeownership: Credit, Discrimination, and the American State. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wise, Tess. 2024. “A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Bankruptcy’s Political Development.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 45(2): 276-287.
Yamin, Priscilla. 2012. American Marriage: A Political Institution. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Zackin, Emily. 2020. “Rethinking Blaisdell: State Debt Relief and the Limits of Constitutional Doctrine,” Law & Social Inquiry 45(3): 658-677.
Zackin, Emily. 2013. Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places: Why State Constitutions Contain America’s Positive Rights. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
© Copyright 2026 by author, Kathleen Sullivan.
