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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
"Petitions Without Number": Women’S Petitions And The Early Nineteenth-Century Origins Of Marriage-Based Entitlements, Kristin Collins
"Petitions Without Number": Women’S Petitions And The Early Nineteenth-Century Origins Of Marriage-Based Entitlements, Kristin Collins
Studio for Law and Culture
Between 1792 and 1858, Congress enacted approximately seventy-six public law statutes granting cash subsidies to large classes of military widows. War widows’ pensions were not wholly unknown in Anglo-American law before this time, but the widows’ pension system of the early nineteenth century was distinctive in both scope and kind: Congress rejected the class-based approach that had characterized war widows’ pensions of the eighteenth century by pensioning widows of rank-and-file soldiers, not just widows of officers, and by extending pensions to widows of veterans. This significant equalization and expansion of widows’ pensions resulted in the creation of the first broad-scale …