ABSTRACT
A few years after the close of the American Revolution, the January 1788 issue of Philadelphia’s monthly Columbian Magazine published the first of five parts of “A Tract on the Unreasonableness of the Laws of England in regard to Wives.” The unidentified male author writes surprisingly sympathetically of the plight of wives, observing that while much of the inequality arises from biblical injunction, the realities of married life compound the disabilities in law; “when we refuse to bear our part of the curse, with what equity can we ask them to bear theirs?” After laying out a detailed and persuasive analysis of the rigors of the common law that keep married women at a severe disadvantage, he wonders rather daringly whether “all parts of a community have not a right to a degree of liberty and property, correspondent to the constitution under which they live.” From there he concludes that it is pointless to argue that women would make poor use of such a right; “if the law of God and the rules of equity allow it them, they have a right to it.” 1 There is no indication in the journal that the work had been published previously, and more importantly, that silent editing had altered the gender of the speaker, changing pronouns from “we” to “they.” The tract was in fact published in England over fifty years earlier, and written by a woman.
