Before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, women were basically dehumanized when they entered into a marriage. “The accepted social subordination of a woman and a wife was further substantiated by the law. Basically, upon marriage, a woman became a legal non-person (Norbert, 1). Prior to 1870, debates regarding divorce, married women’s property, and child custody revolved around different ideas of what constituted “the good marriage” (Ablow, 1). The Married Women’s Property Act changed the way marriage was thought about in England. Progressives and conservatives disagreed about what made a marriage “good.” Conservatives claimed that coverture guaranteed sympathetic communion between spouses, while progressives claimed that legal equality was important for husbands and wives to fully enter into one another’s feelings (Ablow, 1). The act ultimately sided more with the progressives.

The Act set the stage for considering married women legally independent and responsible citizens by establishing the principle of married women’s separate property (Ablow, 1). This was very important for working women because it was the first time they were allowed to have control over their own wages or retain any land that they inherited. However, while this law made progress for women, it was not even close to giving women what they deserve. They still did not have rights over all their own property, as there was a £200 limit on any money they inherited (Ablow, 1). They gained the right to “own and control most forms of personal property” (Combs, 1033). The act also reduced the risk of women’s personal property being taken away by their husband, his parents, or his creditors (Combs, 1033).

This Act was a long time coming, as there were many laws that “chipped away at the privileges accorded to the husband under coverture” leading up to the Act in 1870 (Ablow, 1). Some of these laws included the Custody of Infants Act (1839), which allowed mothers to gain custody of children under the age of seven when before that custody would have been immediately granted to the father; and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857) which created the possibility of divorce without an Act of Parliament (Ablow, 1).  Even though there would still be a long way to go for British women’s rights, the Married Women’s Property Acts “signaled the beginning of the end of the Victorian view of the submissive wife” (Norbert, 1). It was for sure a step in the right direction, but many scholars argue that this act did not really do that much for women.

While this act wouldn’t have impacted our characters in Jane Eyre or The Woman in White because it would have taken place after the novels were published, it can help us get some understanding as to what our characters would have endured in marriages. For example, in Jane entering a marriage to Rochester, she would have been giving up any rights to her inheritance. All of her possessions would have been “passed into her husband’s hands” (Norbert, 1).

Works Cited 

Ablow, Rachel. “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act.” (2012). BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. Accessed 5 October 2022.

Norbert, Charles, "The Married Women's Property Act, 1882: A Study of Victorian Reform" (1977). Masters Theses & Specialist Projects. Web. Accessed 5 October 2022.

Combs, Mary Beth. “‘A Measure of Legal Independence’: The 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and the Portfolio Allocations of British Wives.” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 65, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1028–57. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3874913">http://www.jstor.org/stable/3874913. Accessed 5 Oct. 2022.