• "One of the first laws to benefit women's rights  was enacted in Connecticut in 1809 and it gave them the right to have a will."
  
• "Before the Civil War, married women's property laws were concerned with equity procedures, focusing on the appropriate pleadings a wife should use to file a suit but not altering a husband's privileges granted by prior common law principles." 
  
• "In 1882 provisions were made by the legislature to guarantee that women could finally keep all personal and real property that she had gotten before and during her marriage."
  
• "1813 legislators added to the reasons thought proper to entail divorce by allowing the granting of petitions based on abandonment and conviction of a felony."
  
• " Other provisions of the 1843 laws included protections for women. One section provided for restraints against a violent husband while the divorce was pending (a sort of a 19th century restraining order) and the provision for alimony and child support.
  
• Divorces rates continued to rise year to year with the advent of new and improved rights of women and a more open range of reasons that a wife could file for divorce, to over 1000 divorces by the First World War.
  
• "In 1857, women could divorce husbands who were cruel to them husbands who left them."
  
• A petition given to Parliament in 1856, signed by 26,000 women was the ground work for the passing of the Married Women's Property Act."
  
• "Women were expected to be married by the age of  twenty-one years of age. "
• "Unmarried women were more legally independent than the married ones (middle class) during this era, if the women didn't get married they didn't have to give up their possessions to a husband."
• "Single women had more rights than married ones, single women could own property, pay taxes to the state, and vote in the local parish, while married women gave up all of their rights and property to the man they married.".
• " During this era a girl could marry when she was as young as twelve years of age."
• "Women of the mid-19th century had very little choices of how they lived their lives." 
• "Women's clothing symbolized their constricted lives, the clothing was restrictive and lacked flash, because they were not to bring attention to themselves"
• Once women married, their property rights were governed by English common law
• "In the Northern states when slavery was abolished, black women gained right to marry."                        
• "Marriage changed women’s legal status dramatically during the era, for the most part they gave up all of their rights and were made to bow to the wills and the rule of the husband."
• In 1879, there were 55 divorces. The highest number of divorces in a single year had been 66 in 1878
• All children born within a marriage belonged solely to the husband and the wife had no rights over them. 
• The Act did not cover property held in her own name before marriage
• NY legislative committee said allowing wives to control their own property would lead.
  
  
  
  
   
  
  
  
   
  
  
  

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