Historical Concepts of Family Protection in Estate Law Dowry
Marriage and Coverture | Trusts and Guardianship
Living in Poverty | Slavery
During near of American history, women�s lives in most states were circumscribed by mutual law brought to N America by English language colonists. These spousal relationship and property laws, or "coverture," stipulated that a married woman did not have a separate legal beingness from her husband. A married woman or feme covert was a dependent, similar an underage child or a slave, and could non ain property in her own name or control her own earnings, except nether very specific circumstances. When a husband died, his wife could not be the guardian to their under-age children. Widows did have the right of "dower," a correct to property they brought into the spousal relationship every bit well every bit to life usage of one-third of their husbands� estate. Though a married woman was non able to sue or sign contracts on her own, her husband often did have to obtain her consent before he sold whatsoever property his wife had inherited.
Apart from such by and large applicable laws, many women were in a position of legal dependence equally a result of their detail situation, be it youth, poverty, or enslavement. Since coverture, and with it the right to dower, started to erode in the commencement half of the nineteenth century, wealthy fathers and husbands often left their daughters� estates in a trust. The assumption was that women would be better off with the fruits of the estate than with ability over money or property that could exist taken from them through union before their sons were old enough to take charge of the estate.
Outside of the legitimizing context of belongings ownership or family identity, women might effectively be rendered non-persons. Since they had limited means of economic survival outside spousal relationship, some indigent women ended up existent or virtual wards of the country or town in which they lived. In British-Colonial America, where institutionalization of the poor was not the norm, a woman�southward advent on town poverty roles probably meant not much more than that the town took financial responsibility, however minimal, for one who could non do and then herself. By the nineteenth century, yet, poverty came to exist seen as a personal flaw, though poor women were less stigmatized than poor men until the belatedly nineteenth century. Even so, women were discipline to labor impressment and loss of independence of decision once they crossed the threshold of the poorhouse.
Like union, slavery denied women a dissever legal existence. Female person slaves became part of the legal identity of the men who were in theory responsible for their maintenance and answered for their behavior. This is why eighteenth-century newspapers carried advertisements where a man publicly renounced his responsibility for his estranged married woman�s debts and renounced debts for runaway slaves. But whereas married women might accept recourse to sure rights and traditions, slave women had none whatever. They were owned, traded, and sometimes forced to have children, entirely dependent on the proficient or bad intentions of their owners.
Implementation of and disharmonize about these various legal, and perhaps extra-legal merely customary, strictures produced a rich source of records for women�south history and for the history of women�s role in economic practise.
Marriage and Coverture
Legal papers, manor records, lawyers� notes, and correspondence certificate the sometimes contested practices surrounding married women�s legal beingness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Trusts and Guardianship
A number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections comprise guardian accounts, trust accounts, and other documentation relating to trusts that benefit women, as well as information regarding the guardianship of minors.
Living in Poverty
Collections that contain records related to town poor relief in Massachusetts and Vermont, spanning the eighteenth and half of the nineteenth century, and document the interrelations between the lives of ill or impoverished women and the women and men of their communities.
Slavery
Records documenting the personal existence of those who existed only as chattels under the law, in bills of sale, advertisements, and buying records from the belatedly eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth.
Documenting Women'southward History Nathan Webb was a lawyer in Portland, Maine in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1882 he became gauge of the United States District Court for Maine. His papers illuminate a variety of the ways in which American women�s lives intersected with ceremonious police force in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the laws of coverture, inheritance settlements, and litigation over various matters. "I enclose the mem- of the valuation of our estate on the town books," wrote Rebecca Usher to Nathan Webb on July 26, 1893. "Our estate" was the inheritance of her sister Martha Usher Osgood, in which Rebecca had a life interest. After her death, the manor would autumn to one of her other sisters, Jane. Nathan Webb, who was married to Jane Conductor, was the executor of the estate. Fourteen lively letters, written by Rebecca Usher to Webb in 1893 and 1894, show a adult female in firm control of her fiscal affairs who gained complete control of the manor from Webb in 1898. Webb�due south records contain thirty years of accounts and correspondence about the finances and legal affairs of the Usher sisters and other women, every bit well as wills, probate records and records of Webb�south guardianship of pocket-sized children. Webb also kept accounts of investments and claims against estates he administrated, including childcare and nursing care payments. The Webb collection too includes records of legal cases involving women as plaintiffs. The accounts of Nathaniel Osgood's estate include the records of a disputed claim past Mary O. Cushman, who worked in Osgood's shop for 45 years. Of particular note are ii 1877 letters from schoolteacher Fannie A. Haskell apropos taking legal activeness against the town of New Gloucester, Maine. Haskell alleged that the town's poor maintenance of the roads caused an blow which kept her from working during the winter. This alphabetic character recounts the outrage of the townspeople at the proffer of a lawsuit: "one prominent denizen in a public meeting inquired, 'what can you practise with an obstinate, wilful girl?'"
Alphabetic character from Rebecca Usher to Nathan Webb, July 26, 1893. 
Letter of the alphabet from Fannie Haskell to Nathan Webb, Baronial 27, 1887.
Source: https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/collections/women_law/