The first struggle made by women in their own behalf was against this condition of marital slavery.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, and others of that brave band of rebellious women, were active for years, addressing legislative committees in New York and Massachusetts, circulating petitions, writing to newspapers, agitating everywhere in favor of married women’s property rights.  Finally it began to dawn on the minds of men that there might be a certain public advantage, as well as private justice, attaching to separate ownership by married women of their own property.

In 1839 the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a cautious measure giving married women qualified property rights.  It was not until 1848 that a really effective Married Women’s Property Law was secured, by action of the New York State Assembly.  The law served as a model in many of the new Western States just then framing their laws.

These New York legislators, and the Western legislators who first granted property rights to married women, were actuated less by a sense of justice towards women than by enlightened selfishness.  The effect of so much freedom on women themselves was a matter for grave conjecture.  It was not suggested by any of the American debaters, as it was later on the floors of the English Parliament, that women, if they controlled their own property, would undoubtedly squander it on men whom they preferred to their husbands.  But it was prophesied that women once in possession of money would desert their husbands by regiments,—­which speaks none too flatteringly of the husbands of that day.

Men of property stood for the Married Women’s Property Act, because they perceived plainly that their own wealth, devised to daughters who could not control it, might easily be gambled away, or wasted through improvidence, or diverted to the use of strangers.  In other words, they knew that their property, when daughters inherited it, became the property of their sons-in-law.  They had no guarantee that their own grandchildren would ever have the use of it, unless it was controlled by their mothers.

It was the women’s clubs and women’s organizations in America, as it was the Women’s Councils in Europe, that actively began the agitation against women’s legal disabilities.  The National Woman Suffrage Association, oldest of all women’s organizations in the United States, has been calling attention to the unequal laws, and demanding their abolishment, for two generations.

Practically all of the state federations of women’s clubs have legislative committees, and it is usually the business of these committees to codify the laws of their respective States which apply directly to women.  In some cases a woman lawyer is made chairman, and the work is done under her direction.  Sometimes, as in Texas, a well known and friendly man lawyer is retained for the task.  Almost invariably the report of the legislative committee contains disagreeable surprises.  American women have been so accustomed to their privileges that they have taken their rights for granted, and are usually astonished when they find how limited their rights actually are.