ABSTRACT
Of all areas of US public policy, family law appears to be one of the most central to the status and rights of women. The women who met in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 for the first woman’s rights gathering placed the issue of woman’s place in the family high on their agenda. Their Declaration of Sentiments recognized that law had rendered married women “civilly dead” (Stanton, Anthony, and Gage 1881, p. 70). Men had set up all the rules of marriage and divorce, they argued, “wholly regardless of the happiness of women … going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands” (p. 71). The problem of women’s status in the family has not always been cast as such a direct confrontation of male power as in the 1848 declaration. But women’s special relation to reproduction and their longstanding social role in family matters make this area of public policy important to any treatment of women’s rights.
