ABSTRACT
Over the course of the colonial period the property rights of women, particularly those of married women and widows, changed as a result of county courts’ practices, deliberate legislation at the colony level, general court decisions, and imperial directives from the king and Privy Council. While court records reveal that changes began in the seventeenth century, innovations became more obvious when the Virginia Assembly overhauled the colony’s statutes in 1705 and then enacted further large-scale changes and clarifications in 1727, 1748, and 1752. Any colonial legislation required dialogue between colony and mother country because the crown retained the option to “disallow” (veto) colonial legislation. As a result, legal innovations in the colony played out against the backdrop of English expectations, making the transatlantic framework significant for understanding the history of women’s property rights. While some changes brought women’s property rights in Virginia more in line with English expectations, others did not and risked rejection by imperial authority. This chapter considers the extent of “anglicization”—the process of bringing colonial law into conformity with British practices—in three different areas defining Virginia women’s property ownership: married women’s power over family land, married women’s claims to their families’ slaves, and finally, legislation that established married women’s access to their own earnings and property. 1 What these three aspects reveal is that women’s property rights followed no easily discerned trajectory toward “improvement” or “decline,” or even “innovation” or “anglicization.” 2 Instead, two different trajectories developed. On the one hand, colonists anglicized their legal procedures; on the other, the second and third generations of colonists diverged from English assumptions about property, which included land and the slaves who made land ownership valuable. These trends affected the ownership of property by married women. The contrast between English and colonial attitudes became apparent when Virginians attempted to float two mid-eighteenth-century test cases about married women’s right to dispose of property, and these cases ultimately reached the English solicitor general’s office. In these two final cases, colonists diverged from their English counterparts, only to have imperial authorities undermine their efforts. 3
