Spousal Rights Quotes
This relatively radical viewpoint regarding equal rights for women was expressed by Roosevelt as his Senior thesis at Harvard in 1880. In those days, the kind of scrutiny of everything a candidate ever wrote or said that is characteristic of modern politics, did not exist. It is very doubtful that if the Republican Party officials had ever known that he had espoused these views—even as a young student, that he ever would have risen so high in the party, much less get nominated at the Vice Presidential candidate which was his entree to the Presidency. When in office however, there is no record of him reviving his youthful proposal that women who marry retain their maiden names.
At the time and for many years afterward, once a woman married in America, she lost most of the legal rights she had. She could not own property—the husband controlled it all, and she had no rights to make family decisions including the upbringing of her own children.
The decision was unanimous. Virginia’s racist slave era tradition used the power of the state to forbid interracial marriage for the purpose of maintaining white supremacy. Most of the Southern, formerly slave, states had such laws. The most absurd aspect of the anti miscegenation laws was that all whites and Blacks—and other so caltcled “races” all emanated from the same African human female who was Black.
the legal power automatically then given to a husband over his wife’s body and property
Even into the 20th Century in some states women could not inherit property if there was a male child.
