Probate Confiscation and the Unjust Laws which Govern Women.
[Legal issues]. Stow, Mrs. J.W. Probate Confiscation and the Unjust Laws which Govern Women. San Francisco: Bacon & Company, (1876).
8vo.; engraved frontispiece; maroon cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt and blind; a pretty copy.
First and only edition of this scarce early American feminist legal guide, one of the first examples written by a woman for a female readership. Little is known about Mrs. J.W. Stow; her name does not appear in any standard feminist references. Her book is structured around various “case studies” of women (herself included) who have been wronged by America’s probate laws. Much of Stow’s text details how, due to inequities in the laws governing women and inheritance, she was cheated out of a fortune when her husband died.
Women’s ability to own property—or rather, their lack thereof—became a central suffrage concern in the mid-19th century, when more and more upper class American women began, however timidly, to assert their moral if not their legal right to inherit family land and assets. Not until the turn of the century did a majority of states modify the “Married Women’s Property Acts”—that series of Anglo-American common-law traditions which held that husband and wife together constituted one economic entity, with all property owned and controlled by the husband–to allow women even fractional control over so-called “family property.” Women would not gain full property rights until after the passage of the 19th Amendment.
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