ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how women's responses to the legal system helped to shape the law and legal culture in the nineteenth century. For most of the nineteenth century, women in the United States, particularly married women, functioned under legal disabilities imposed by law. There were many different women in nineteenth-century United States, representing different races, classes, ethnicities, and geographic locations. Women writers addressed gender-specific laws that restricted women. In 1845, three years before the Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, Margaret Fuller published her seminal book on women's rights in the United States, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Women were conditioned to believe that the law and money were a man's business. For nineteenth-century women, education was a crucial factor in their century-long struggle to free themselves from restrictive laws. In colonial times, only girls from wealthy families received some education.
