Freedom was what so many American women wanted, and they would do anything to get it. After all, America had been founded on the promise of freedom. In April 1848, forty-four married women in western New York wrote to the New York state legislature citing America’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, noting, “Your Declaration of Independence declares, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And as women have never consented to, been represented in, or recognized by this government, it is evident that in justice no allegiance can be claimed from them. Our numerous and yearly petitions for this most desirable object having been disregarded, we now ask your august body, to abolish all laws which hold married women more accountable for their acts than infants, idiots, and lunatics.”
That same year, American suffragists held the Seneca Falls Convention, where women argued not just that they should have the right to vote and hold property, but that marriage itself should be changed. Women, created equally, should be treated equally. And change began to happen. In 1848, New York passed a married women’s property act. It wasn’t the first—that had been passed in Mississippi, nearly a decade before. But after New York, other states followed—passing laws that allowed women to own property, keep income, and have a right to property acquired through marriage.
As women became more financially free, marriage became more about love and sex rather than commerce (or so we told ourselves). But it was a slow change. Women couldn’t get a mortgage or own credit cards without the approval of a father or husband until 1974. For centuries, rape was defined as between a man and a woman “not his wife,” establishing the fact that no matter the reality, legally, a husband could do what he wanted with his wife, and he did. Those laws began to change in the ’70s but even now, some states like South Carolina treat marital and nonmarital rape differently.
The story of marriage is just as much about who is included in the narrative as it is about who is excluded. The book Far More Terrible for Women is a collection of the stories of women who were enslaved in America before the Civil War. These women recount love unions ripped apart because it was more advantageous for their owners to have them married to someone else, and partnerships made for breeding purposes, only to be ended when husbands were sold away or killed.