Nineteenth-century Great Britain experienced a number of significant social reforms, from labor to suffrage to women's rights. Both the middle and lower classes fought for more rights and freedoms on every social level. The victories were slow and gradual, as is the nature of reform in an era when those in charge are reluctant to yield any of their social, economic and political powers.
Holcombe writes about the slow but steady advances won by advocates of women's property law rights over the course of the century. Married women in England were seen essentially as the property of their husbands and therefore did not have the right to property themselves. The author cites one legal case in which the contents of a woman's purse were considered the property of her husband. Such laws not only saw woman as their husbands' servants or chattel; they also "destroyed her independence, her identity, and her self-respect." Reform of the common law related to property rights gave women what proved to be the beginning of their rightful power as individual citizens, and stands out as a major achievement of nineteenth-century early feminism (Holcombe 3).
The importance of this reform of such a fundamental law as property rights leads to inevitable reform of other laws flowing from and associated in various ways with property rights. The attack by British women on property law in the name of "equity" was part of a much broader attack on the established socioeconomic and political patriarchy of that country and that time (Holcombe 6).
Such basic reform was not easily won. The patriarchal establishment was not about to release its hold on the reins of power, and woman, workers and the poor had to struggle for every inch of victory. Nevertheless, reform of property rights did not lead to swift reform in, for example, the area of voting rights: "Reform of the married women's property law was carried, while the movement for women's suffrage was ...