Abstract
‘The oft repeated rule of the common law is that marriage is an absolute gift to the husband of all the personal estate of the wife which she had at the time of the marriage, or which accrues to her in her own right, during coverture …’ By 1900, Missouri had a quarter century’s experience with its version of the Married Women’s Property Act, enacted in 1875 to reverse the common law and decree that personal property acquired by a married woman was her own, and later in 1889 a similar statute for real property. While the new statutes did not affect any property a wife had acquired before its passage, they specifically provided that the husband had no right to anything she obtained after the law went into effect …
Knaplund, Kristine S, Women and Wills: An Empirical Analysis of the Married Women’s Property Act and its Remarkable Resonance Today (2018). Rutgers Law Record, Volume 45, 2018; Pepperdine University Legal Studies Research Paper.
First posted 2018-08-24 06:20:02
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