ABSTRACT
To its opponents in the Houses of Parliament, the Married Women's Property Bill constituted a powerful threat to the symbolic boundaries of the home. Perhaps the best-known example of the extreme arguments mounted in defence of men's inalienable property rights can be found in the hostile speech delivered by Lord Shaftesbury in the House of Lords in 1870, in which he asked 'whether, if the bill passed, a woman might not quarrel with her husband, eject him from the house which was her property, and "while keeping him out of it ... admit everyone else?'" (Holcombe, 1983, p.175). This mordant question clearly articulates what lay behind much of the opposition to married women gaining property rights. The 'domestic rule which had prevailed in this country for more than 1,000 years', as Lord Westbury put it during the same debate (p.174), was the rule of sexual control; and a wife's access to her separate property, the property she had brought to the marriage or earned as a wife, was perceived as a sign of her renewed sexual availability. As the Times reported, Lord Penzance viewed wives as those 'with whom flirtation is only kept short of adultery by the fear of himself and the machinery he directs' (p.174). In these debates the regulation of women's property in law was tightly involved with the regulation of women's sexual desires. Coverture protected a woman from her own property, and therefore from an aspect of herself to which she was highly vulnerable (an important extension of the central tenet of liberal political theory fundamentally affining property with individuality). In doing so it also ostensibly protected her from material corruption. Likewise, the prescribed notion of 'sexual dormancy' in medical discourse (retailed in such tracts as William Acton's Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 1857) protected her from the same corrupting aspect of her own nature, with its implied threat to inheritance, and thence to property. If passed into law, the Married Women's
Property Bill would irreparably break down the essential distinction between the angel in the house and the fallen woman. Once broken down, the middleclass family home, to which 'everyone' might be admitted, was by extension vulnerable to the incursions of other more ominous forces of change, and the enemies of women's property reform hinted at the implied menace to private property in general contained within the refractory behaviour of a woman granted 'insubordination, equality, and something more' (qu. Holcombe, 1983, p.175).
