Constitutional context : women and rights discourse in nineteenth-century America / Kathleen S. Sullivan.

Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.

59026

Women's rights -- United States -- History.

Women -- Legal status, laws etc. -- United States.

Constitutional history -- United States.

Introduction: Context in the constitutional order

1. Codification of the common law considered

2. Abstracting rights

3. The Married Women's Property Acts: death blow to coverture?

4. The Married Women's Property Acts: collaborating for coverture

5. The domesticity of the domestic relations

6. Common law lost.

While the United States was founded on abstract principles of certain "unalienable rights," such as equality, its legal traditions are based in British common law. In this book, Sullivan considers the nineteenth-century 's congressional debates, state legislation, judicial opinions, news accounts, and work of political activists. She concludes that women's rights activists unwittingly undermined common law's ability to redress grievances, contributing heavily to the social, cultural, and political stagnation that characterizes the place of women and the movement today.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9780801885525

x, 181 p.