g
all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to
sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted,
and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what
we are to be.

After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it
is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special
point included in the general one--a woman's right to her own
property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any
impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a
woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after
marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the
husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their
exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the
power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for
children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a
separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal
fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the
strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an
entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common
between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting
on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.

This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to
common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of
remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be
little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already,
in many of the new and several of the old States of the American
Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written
Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:
and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage
relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them
one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and
preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution,
which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him
without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of
her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property,
but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man