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Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed a natural experiment with potential to change the lives of women: the 1870 Married Women's Property Act. The act gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control certain forms of property and thus provided them with the opportunity to change their investment portfolios and shift wealth-holding to forms of property that they could both own and control. For this reason contemporary reformers hailed the act as a major achievement of the women's movement; however, there still exists a debate among modern scholars about whether women benefited from the act. Feminist historians have long regarded the act as a milestone in the emancipation of women. A few argue that the act deserves a place "in the pantheon of historical events" and praise its impact on the lives of women. Others note, however, that even after the act other factors in combination with the law likely limited the ability of women to control their economic lives on an equal footing with men.
That married women received property rights at all, in a male-governed society where men controlled much of the property and women had no right to vote in Parliamentary elections, has consumed the curiosity of all the major contributors to the study of married women's property legislation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As with all major legal changes, and as the work of the scholars involved in the discussion of the married women's property legislation indicates, the motivations behind the passage of the act were complicated. A few influential groups who served as a driving force behind the passage of the British Act have been studied extensively by historians: The British feminist movement by Lee Holcombe and Norma Basch; parliamentarians by Mary Lyndon Shanley, Basch, and Ben Griffin; separated couples and the separate estates of upper-middle-class women by R. J. Morris.
Recently, legal historians began to scrutinize the act more carefully in order to contextualize the 1870 intervention by linking developments in the law on married women's property with bankruptcy law. These scholars have focused on the loopholes that the relatively better off were able to use to safeguard their daughters' property from male predators. For example, a study of Parliamentary debates and Chancery Court cases argues that...