In the 1870s Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched by a young thief in London. When he appeared in court to testify, she heard the young man charged with 'stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £1 18s 6d the property of Henry Fawcett.' Long after the episode she recalled: 'I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.' The English common law which deprived married women of the right to own and control property had far-reaching consequences for the status of women not only in other areas of law and in family life but also in education, and employment, and public life. To win reform of the married women's property law, feminism as an organized movement appeared in the 1850s, and the final success of the campaigns for reform in 1882 was one of the greatest achievements of the Victorian women's movement. Dr Holcombe explores the story of the reform campaign in the context of its time, giving particular attention to the many important men and women who worked for reform and to the debates on the subject which contributed greatly to the formulation of a philosophy of feminism.

Women and the Law of Property in Early America

Drawing on newly available archival case records, this book demonstrates that Chinese women's rights to property changed substantially from the Song through the Qing dynasties, and even more dramatically under the Republican Civil Code of 1929-30.

The true story of a brave woman’s nearly 40 years in a polygamous cult, her eventual escape, and her struggle to integrate into a world she barely knew. In the early 1970s an innocent teenager who had led a sheltered life was forced to leave her family and enter into a polygamous, abusive, and deviant relationship with a man called the Prophet. In 2008, nearly 40 years later, she fled his religious sect. Property is not a misnomer. It accurately depicts how the women in the sect were treated. Carol Christie reveals the degradation, abuse, and brainwashing that the Church Wives endured. She exposes the physical abuse, the mental cruelty, the slave labour, and the sexual deviance that took place near Owen Sound, a small community just a few hours north of Toronto, as well as at other locations. She describes the many opportunities that officials had to investigate but walked away from, swayed by the charismatic Prophet. Carol is building a new life, one of freedom and options. With no money and no job she started again and is now dedicated to helping others who have escaped while raising awareness about the dangers of the cult.

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England turns to these points of departure for the study of women's legal status and property relationships in the early modern period.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.