Reforms in 19th Century Great Britain

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 patri

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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1086
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page)

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