![]() She received no protected interest in her husband’s personal property, including that which originally belonged to her. In exchange for the surrender of her legal identity and her property to her husband, the common law granted a married woman two rights: the right of support (to be fed, clothed, and sheltered) and the right of dower (a right to the income and use of one-third of the real estate that her husband owned during the marriage if she survived him). ![]() Nor could they act as independent legal guardians of their children. Furthermore, married women were denied such civil rights as the right to sue or be sued in their own name or keep any judgment recovered on their behalf, to manage or control their real property, to own personal property, to keep their wages, or to make a contract or will. 2īecause under the law a husband and wife were considered one person (and that person was the husband), they could not testify for or against each other in court. 1 Under the doctrine of coverture, upon marriage a woman’s “very being or legal existence suspended during the marriage or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband,” according to William Blackstone, the seventeenth-century compiler of the common law. While some of its provisions were dropped in transit, the principle of “coverture” remained intact. In the first half of the nineteenth century, women’s legal status was still defined in large measure by common law, a form of British jurisprudence transported to the American colonies. It also removed any recognition of legal rights of plural wives but in some other areas of the law, the legal advances experienced by Utah women survived the transition to statehood. The process of accommodation that followed federal anti-polygamy legislation eventually led to the discontinuation of the practice by the Mormon Church and opened the way to statehood. Some of these innovative measures, however, were casualties of the escalating assertion of federal power, aimed at destroying polygamy and Mormon political hegemony in the territory. ![]() ![]() Paradoxically, this system forced a consciousness of women’s legal rights by Utah’s territorial legislature and put Utah in the vanguard of efforts to improve the legal status of women. According to its defenders, it was a God-given commandment that should have been protected as a free exercise of religion by the U.S. By any name, it was a system of female enslavement, according to its critics and was designated an illegal practice after 1862 by federal decree. Polygamy (the popular name) or polygny (the technically correct term for marriage between a man and multiple wives) was a basic tenet of Mormonism. While influenced to varying degrees by the first two developments in American history, the third most clearly defined the focus of early Utah territorial law with respect to women.Ĭreating territorial law to support Mormon ideology and practice, particularly by providing a legal identity for plural wives and their children within the framework of American jurisprudence, required innovative and imaginative measures by Utah lawmakers. The story of the legal status of women in territorial Utah (1850–96) weaves together three historical strands: the expansion of women’s legal rights nationally, the liberalizing tendencies of frontier development, and most important, the necessity of protecting Mormon control and practices, including plural marriage, and ultimately defending them against the counter measures of the federal government. Lisa Madsen Pearson and Carol Cornwall Madsen The Legal Status of Women in Territorial Utah, 1850–1896
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