Vindicating the Founders by Thomas G. West

Author:Thomas G. West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 1997-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

The American elevation of women is also illustrated by a striking fact reported by historian Jay Fliegelman: “Whereas before 1775 virtually all extant family portraits present the father standing above his seated family, after that date the vertical or hierarchical composition gives way to a horizontal or equalitarian composition in which all family members are shown on the same plane.”47

Legal changes followed. Several states “applied and developed a body of law allowing femes coverts [married women] to own separate property.” All states abolished primogeniture, which had given eldest sons priority in inheritances, so that daughters now inherited more nearly equally with their brothers. Divorce law was reformed in most Northern and some Southern states. In Pennsylvania, for example, permissible grounds were widened to include adultery, cruelty, abandonment, and impotence. Divorced women were given feme sole status, enabling them to get credit and go into business. They could obtain alimony from their ex-husbands for their support when the husband was at fault.48

Allowing cruelty as a ground for divorce was one response to Abigail Adams’s concern over men’s abuse of their wives under the old order:

In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. . . . Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? . . . Regard us then as beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being, make use of that power only for our happiness.49

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