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Marriage, Divorce, and the Gendered Organization of Private Property

Sat, August 11, 10:30 to 11:30am, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 5, Salon G

Abstract

Sociological theory suggests that married women’s economic power enables their exit from unsatisfying relationships but may also generate marital dissatisfaction among husbands. Existing research measures wives’ economic power in terms of the gendered division of labor, overlooking the ways that the formal institutions of legal marriage and divorce create gender inequalities in wealth and accumulation. I examine the impact of marital property rights changes on the modern emergence of mass divorce in the United States in the late nineteenth century. During that period, nearly all American states passed Married Women’s Property Acts that gave married women the right to own and control wealth separately from their husbands. Using newly digitized administrative data covering nearly all legal divorces in the United States between 1867 and 1906, I show that married women’s expanded property rights led to substantial increases in divorce, little of which can be attributed to selection into marriage. Additional divorces were sought by husbands as much as by wives, suggesting that husbands chafed at wives’ growing economic autonomy at the same time it allowed more women to dissolve unhappy marriages. The approach illustrates the utility of property rights analysis to studying gender inequality and demographic change.

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