Date of Graduation

2001

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MA

Committee Chair

Barbara J. Howe

Abstract

While the nation debated the rights of citizenship and freedmen’s rights, legislators in the newly formed state of West Virginia instigated a legal revolution in women’s rights in the state. During the nineteenth century a married woman suffered “civil death” upon marriage in that she became the property of her husband. Thus, laws governing divorce, dower, and married women’s property held an unparalleled amount of control over a woman’s daily life. Oftentimes, issues of who could marry and remarry; who gained custody of minor children; who was entitled to alimony, maintenance, insurance, and curtesy; who had the ability to sue or be sued; and who had control of the woman’s wages and body all fell under either divorce, dower, or married women’s property laws. Therefore, divorce, dower, and married women’s property laws defined what rights a woman, especially a married woman, had. During their roughly ten years in power, the Republicans, who had gained control of the government during the statehood movement, liberalized divorce law, allotted to widowers the same one-third dower right that widows held, passed an insurance law which enabled wives to insure the lives of their husbands, put into place West Virginia’s first married women’s property law, and addressed the issue of woman’s suffrage on several occasions. The Republicans also addressed married women’s earnings under the new property law, and providing that wives who lived separately from their husbands could carry on business and collect their own wages as if they were single women. In making all of these changes in women’s legal rights, legislators instigated a legal revolution in women’s rights in the state.

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