Relinquishing control: The married women's property acts in mid-nineteenth-century America

In the middle part of the nineteenth century, male state legislators passed a series of laws that endowed married women with the rights to own and control property, rights formerly held solely by their husbands. While these laws seem contrary to the collective economic interests of men, they passed in state after state around the country. The laws are an unusual example of institutional change in which a group with a monopoly on the political sphere divested itself of a valuable set of property rights. They raise the question: why?; I use a new institutional model to argue that these laws were passed at this particular point in American history because the existing legal definitions of intra-family property rights increased transaction costs within the growing market economy. Historians have written anecdotally of the inconveniences and litigation costs caused by the ambiguities of the earlier system, and I use these historical examples in a narrative argument presented as a case study of institutional change. The results of an econometric test I develop using census data support the initial hypothesis that married women's property acts were closely correlated with various aspects of market development.