scholarly journals “Champion Man-Hater of All Time”: Feminism, Insanity, and Property Rights in 1940s America

2021 ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Magdalene Zier
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Students ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Credible Threat ◽  
The Will ◽  
Social Views

Legions of law students in property or trusts and estates courses have studied the will dispute, In re Strittmater’s Estate. The cases, casebooks, and treatises that cite Strittmater present the 1947 decision from New Jersey’s highest court as a model of the “insane delusion” doctrine. Readers learn that snubbed relatives successfully invalidated Louisa Strittmater’s will, which left her estate to the Equal Rights Amendment campaign, by convincing the court that her radical views on gender equality amounted to insanity and, thus, testamentary incapacity. By failing to provide any commentary or context on this overt sexism, these sources affirm the court’s portrait of Louisa Strittmater as an eccentric landlady and fanatical feminist. This is troubling. Strittmater should be a well-known case, but not for the proposition that feminism is an insane delusion. Despite the decision’s popularity on law school syllabi, no scholar has interrogated the case’s broader historical background. Through original archival research, this Article centers Strittmater as a case study in how social views on gender, psychology, and the law shaped one another in the immediate aftermath of World War II, hampering women’s property rights and efforts to achieve constitutional equality. More than just a problematic precedent, the case exposes a world in which the “Champion Man-Hater of All Time”—newspapers’ epithet for Strittmater—was not only a humorous headline but also a credible threat to the postwar order that courts were helping to erect. The Article thus challenges the textbook understanding of “insane delusion” and shows that postwar culture was conducive to a strengthening of the longstanding suspicion that feminist critiques of gender inequality were, simply put, crazy.

A Radical Demand Effect: Early US Feminists and the Married Women's Property Acts

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 221-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly J. McCammon ◽  
Sandra C. Arch ◽  
Erin M. Bergner
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Married Women's Property Acts ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
Property Changes ◽  
The Right ◽  
Demand Effect ◽  
Collective Activism

Numerous scholars consider the economic origins of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US married women's property acts. Researchers investigate how economic downturns and women's inroads into business spurred lawmakers to reform property laws to give married women the right to own separate property. Such economic explanations, however, are only a partial story. Our investigation reveals the important role of women's collective activism in winning these legal changes. Women mobilized for property rights often as they pressed for voting rights and, in one case, as they campaigned for an equal rights amendment. We examine circumstances leading to passage of married women's property acts in seven states to show that as women mobilized for property rights alongside voting rights or a broader equal rights law, a radical demand effect unfolded. Lawmakers often considered demands for woman suffrage or an equal rights amendment as more far-reaching and thus more radical and threatening. Such feminist demands, then, provided a foil for property-rights activism, and the contrast led lawmakers to view property demands as more moderate. In addition, as they pressed for these combined reforms, women often engaged in hybrid framing that allowed them to moderate their demand for property reforms by linking their property goals to beliefs already widely accepted. The confluence of these circumstances led political leaders to deem property changes as more moderate and acceptable in an effort to steer feminists away from their radical goals. In the end, the radical demand effect created a political opportunity for passage of the married women's property acts.

Natural Property Rights: Where They Fail

1998 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Ehman
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Initial Conditions ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Natural Property ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Moral Foundation ◽  
The Will

For classical liberals, natural property rights are the moral foundation of the market and of individual freedom. They determine the initial position from which persons legitimately make contracts and assess the validity of collective action. Since they establish the initial conditions of legitimate agreements, they cannot be dependent upon agreements. Persons possess these rights apart from social institutions. Natural rights typically not only prohibit interference with a person's body and mind but also forbid interference with a person's appropriation of unowned natural resources and with his freedom to do as he chooses with the products that he makes from them, so long as he does not infringe upon the equal rights of others. These rights prescribe, as Locke put it, that persons be free “to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit … without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man”.

Different versus Equal: The 1920s

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Woloch
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
State Laws ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Women's Politics

This chapter revisits Adkins and considers the feud over protective laws that arose in the women's movement in the 1920s. The clash between friends and foes of the Equal Rights Amendment—and over the protective laws for women workers that it would surely invalidate—fueled women's politics in the 1920s. Both sides claimed precedent-setting accomplishments. In 1923, the National Woman's Party proposed the historic ERA, which incurred conflict that lasted for decades. The social feminist contingent—larger and more powerful—gained favor briefly among congressional lawmakers, expanded the number and strength of state laws, saw the minimum wage gain a foothold, and promoted protection through the federal Women's Bureau. Neither faction, however, achieved the advances it sought. Instead, a fight between factions underscored competing contentions about single-sex protective laws and their effect on women workers.

scholarly journals Challenging the State: Devolutionary Tenure Transitions for Saving and Expanding Forests

Human Ecology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Alden Wily
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Protected Areas ◽  
Forest Cover ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Convention On Biological Diversity ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
The Will ◽  
Customary Land

AbstractI address a contentious element in forest property relations to illustrate the role of ownership in protecting and expanding of forest cover by examining the extent to which rural communities may legally own forests. The premise is that whilst state-owned protected areas have contributed enormously to forest survival, this has been insufficiently successful to justify the mass dispossession of customary land-owning communities this has entailed. Further, I argue that state co-option of community lands is unwarranted. Rural communities on all continents ably demonstrate the will and capacity to conserve forests – provided their customary ownership is legally recognized. I explore the property rights reforms now enabling this. The replication potential of community protected forestlands is great enough to deserve flagship status in global commitments to expand forest including in the upcoming new Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

scholarly journals Does the U.S. Constitution Need an Equal Rights Amendment?

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 243-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Baldez ◽  
Lee Epstein ◽  
Andrew D. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The U.S

Equality Challenged: Equal Rights and Sexual Difference

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Sherron de Hart
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Federal Legislation ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Republican Government ◽  
The Law

“ERA Won't Go Away!” The words were chanted at rallies and unfurled on banners at countless marches as the deadline—June 30, 1982—approached for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. To include in the Constitution the principle of equality of rights for women, supporters insisted, was an essential of republican government in a democratic society. Congress had shared that perception in 1972, passing a series of measures aimed at strengthening and expanding federal legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sex. Included was a constitutional amendment simply stating that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Thirty-five of the thirty-eight states necessary for a three-fourths majority needed to amend the Constitution had given their approval.

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