14. The House Divided, 1846

Chapter Chronology

Quiz for Experiencing the American Promise: "A Purse of Her Own": Petitioning for the Right to Own Property

Select the best answer for each question. Click the “submit” button for each question to turn in your work.

Question 14.6

1. Under the laws of coverture, a married woman in antebellum America did not have the right to control

which church her family attended.

which man she married.

the money she earned while married.

how many children she had.

Question 14.7

2. What motivated many traditionalists to change their minds about women and property in the late 1830s, and push state legislatures to change the laws to give married women rights over the property they brought into their marriages?

Activism by early feminists like Susan B. Anthony

A cholera epidemic that killed thousands of married men

A more open-minded perspective about women’s rights

The financial panics of the late 1830s

Question 14.8

3. Why did Ernestine Rose argue that the 1848 New York state law, which gave married women control over the property they brought into their marriages, was insufficient?

Rose argued that married women’s property laws would be ineffective so long as women lacked the right to vote.

The law did not give married women control over the money they earned while married, reserving that power for their husbands.

Rose feared that the law would be interpreted to apply only to physical objects, like jewelry, and not currency, like gold or bank notes.

The law only applied to native-born married women, and Rose argued it should apply to immigrant women as well.

Question 14.9

4. Why were Ernestine Rose and Susan B. Anthony particularly worried about poor wives?

Compared to middle- and upper-class women, poor wives were less likely to bring an inheritance into their marriages, so the new state laws about inherited property did not help them.

Although all women lacked the right to vote, poor wives were less likely to have husbands with political power, so their needs were more likely to be overlooked or neglected.

Because married women were financially dependent on their husbands, poor women often found themselves trapped in marriages with men who could not support their children.

Many poor women were forced by their circumstances to marry men they did not love, so they were more vulnerable to having bad husbands who refused to care and provide for them.

Question 14.10

5. What might Ernestine Rose have argued is the connection between women’s economic rights and women’s equality?

Women could not be independent, and thus equal to men, as long as they had to depend on their husbands for their economic livelihood.

Women with an income were more likely to become involved in activism on behalf of women’s equality than women who did not work.

Rose argued that access to divorce was crucial to women’s equality, and working women were able to divorce more readily than women without incomes.