Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [653]
Another powerful group of males—scions of old and propertied families—had a different problem, keeping the family fortune from falling into the hands of predators. Since the seventeenth century, when the English gentry had first grappled with this problem, wealthy New York clans had been insulating a wife’s property by conveying it to a trustee, reserving to the wife powers that ranged from full authority over her property to complete dependence on the designated trustee. In 1844 Philip Hone’s daughter Emily married Frederic G. Foster, but Hone made Frederic De Peyster the trustee over the dowry she brought, and her husband was forbidden to touch the principal.
New York’s equity judges had been going along with this modification of femecovert, but obtaining their approval on a case-by-case basis was a costly and cumbersome business, and even wealthy gentlemen preferred to have such rights guaranteed across the board. It was an era, moreover, when republican-minded citizens and lawyers sought to scrap equity courts as feudal and colonial remnants and to replace arbitrary judge-made law with a uniform statutory code. They succeeded in 1846, when the state constitutional convention abolished the office of chancellor and put equity under jurisdiction of the common-law courts.
It was in this context that a small but aggressive group of feminist campaigners, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ernestine Rose, a recently arrived Polish-Jewish immigrant, struck up an alliance with patrician and propertied men and pushed for a married women’s property statute. Women had long been aware that prenuptial contracts held great potential for them, in that a woman with assets (and the permission of her intended husband) could create a trust that she herself controlled. When Sarah Willis (“Fanny Fern”) took James Parton as her third husband, he signed an agreement stipulating that her property and the proceeds of her writing would belong solely to her and her children. However, few women had the assets or legal sophistication to negotiate such a bargain, and feminists wanted the same rights granted to all.
Resistance to such legislation came from those who feared the gender consequences might outweigh economic benefits. Might not husband and wife come to see their interests as antithetical? Might not a wife compete with her husband in trade? Become the partner of his business rival? Might not such a law incite women to invade bench, bar, pulpit, and dissecting room? Supporters of the law countered that it was not an attack on the economic foundations of patriarchy but rather a way to extend men’s ability to protect dependent women. Their arguments carried the day, and in 1848 the state legislature made a wife’s possessions her own and not subject to her husband’s debts.
The women’s rights advocates who gathered that summer in the upstate New York town of Seneca Falls hailed the law but recognized its limitations. Wives might control their property, but husbands continued to command their earnings. Besides, taken as a whole, marriage still entailed the surrender of a woman’s legal personality. They pressed on.
Further successes came in areas where women’s desires dovetailed with the needs of powerful businessmen. In 1850 a new law allowed married women to control their bank deposits. The act was primarily designed to protect the banks and keep a wife’s deposits out of reach of her husband’s creditors, but it further enhanced women’s financial standing. Next year the legislature decreed that a married woman who owned stock could vote it herself, making all stockholders equal regardless of sex or marital status. Again, this pleased wealthy fathers, who were