Dismantling the Patriarchal State: Women's Rights Activism, Nineteenth-Century Married Women's Property Acts, and Twentieth-Century Jury Rights Laws

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Abstract

Women's activism played a role in bringing about expansions in two key forms of women's legal rights in the United States: the married women's property acts of the 19th century and laws granting women the right to sit on juries in roughly the first half of the 20th century. Much existing research argues that movement characteristics or opportunities in the larger environment lead to favorable political and legal outcomes for movement actors. The current project, however, posits that a combination of movement and contextual factors resulted in a successful outcome for movement activists. Specifically, I investigate how political and gendered opportunities mediated the impact of women's activism on expansions in women's legal rights. I argue that the gendered political context influenced which movement strategies were likely to succeed in winning legal reforms for women. I explore this argument by comparing two very different gendered political contexts: in the 19th century when women possessed little formal political power and in the 20th century when they had gained a substantial political voice. The hypotheses examined in this research posit that these two different gendered political contexts offered different opportunities for activism and these different opportunities markedly influenced which movement strategies resulted in expanded legal rights. The research will be based on archival evidence from women's property and jury rights campaigns and their contexts in 9 U.S. states. Qualitative historical investigation combined with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) will be utilized to discern the factors that resulted in these legal rights reforms. The research will have several broader impacts: it will expand our knowledge of women's public roles, it will offer a number of scholarly training opportunities for graduate students, and it will provide a unique data set concerning the circumstances leading to expansions in women's property rights and jury rights.