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Marriage And Law Reform: Lessons From The Nineteenth Century Michigan Married Women’S Property Acts, Ellen Dannin
Marriage And Law Reform: Lessons From The Nineteenth Century Michigan Married Women’S Property Acts, Ellen Dannin
Ellen Dannin
If law reform had the neat trajectory of a bullet from a smoking gun, life and law would be neater – but less interesting. This article began as a simple empirical study to test whether Michigan’s 1844 Married Women’s Property Act affected conveyancing.
When the results showed that it had no effect – that married women were included as grantors even before the MWPA made it legal for them to own property – the study expanded into a quest to identify the processes that led to its enactment and explained its operation on the family, a fundamental social institution. In …