Women’s Rights

For centuries women were considered the lesser of the sexes. In fact, they were deemed by law in Great Britain as recently as the eighteenth century that they were the possession of their husband and that they in fact no longer existed. The celebrated British judge William Blackstone wrote that a woman lost her legal existence after she married. Even if the woman brought wealth to the marriage, she became a pauper as soon as she said “I do.” If the woman inherited money from her family after she married, the money was under the immediate possession of the husband. Great Britain passed legislation in the late 1800s but it wasn’t effectively enforced until a hundred years later.

Over the centuries men were treated as first-class citizens and women were subservient to them and basically had only the rights that the husband decided to bestow...