Except it’s a stupid lie. And slave drivers like jefferson and friends knew fully well what they were doing.
No, it’s not reasonable, it’s a stupid hypocritical excuse. Just another twist to the laughable idea that if criminals pretend to believe they are not criminals then they are somehow justified.
Are you sure?
Married women.
True, married women had limited ownership rights under the Common Law. Or, rather, the property was shared with her husband. That’s not the same as no property laws at all.
Sorry, husbands had total control of their wives’ property. Kinda like slavery.
false.
It depends how technical you want to get. If we go with the no third solution approach, then compromised property rights, are not property rights. Rights typically are defined as absolutes.
Islam generally had a better conception of property rights almost 1000 years later. While women have always been treated badly in primitive cultures, and certainly many sects and regions of Islam have fallen under this, the reversal of the dowry into a gift to the wife, marriage as a contractual relationship, and separate finances, as well as inheritance rights for women were a big step forward at the time, even if it was more conceptual than applied.
The original statement was very vague, so I thought to qualify it.
In theory. In practice, especially with centralised government, the rights are always somewhat compromised. So it makes more sense to talk about the nature of limitations than simply saying that women had no property rights.
What part about “the property of married women was under total control of their husbands” you don’t understand ?
It wasn’t total. It differed in practice, such as setting up the separate trust for the married women by her family.
Maryland, 1674: required a private interview between a judge and a married woman to confirm her approval of any trade or sale by her husband of her property.
New York, 1771: Act to Confirm Certain Conveyances and Directing the Manner of Proving Deeds to Be Recorded: required a married man to have his wife’s signature on any deed to her property before he sold or transferred it, and required that a judge meet privately with the wife to confirm her approval.
Massachusetts, 1787: a law was passed which allowed married women in limited circumstances to act as femme sole traders.
Connecticut, 1809: law passed permitting married women to execute wills
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/a/property_rights.htm
“In colonial times, law generally followed that of the mother country, England (or in some parts of what later became the United States, France or Spain). In the early years of the United States, following British law, women’s property was under control of their husbands, with states gradually giving women limited property rights. By 1900 every state had given married women substantial control over their property.”
It hardly changes the fact that the system ‘created’ by the founding fraudsters was anything but “EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW”.
No, they are actually absolutes. In practice they are still absolutes. Government interferes with the expression of rights, it cannot redefine them.
I am pretty sure those were not forced marriages…so, sounds like a decision made by the woman of her own free will to enter such an arrangement.
And what are we arguing about now, anyway? Are we capable of having a discussion about historical events without injecting ideology into it? Next thing you know Juan will take the founders to task for not supporting gay marriage either.
Uh oh.
I only stated the fact that the so called founding fraudsters were slave drivers who did not believe in equality before the law. They were criminals and hypocrites. Those are historical facts. If you don’t like historical facts, maybe you should not discuss them.
Ah no you can’t.