I'm reading old Missouri newspapers this afternoon while someone hoots and hollers in the other room over West Virginia's first touchdown within two minutes of the game against Oklahoma State University's Cowboy football team. Three items of interest:
The third clipping from a September 1836 paper finds poor Mrs. Metcalf and her five children in a bind. I can't imagine what limited choices she faced, and the feelings of panic felt.
Chattel:
Most American treated married women according to the concept of coverture, a concept inherited from English common law. Under the doctrine of coverture, a woman was legally considered the chattel of her husband, his possession. Any property she might hold before her marriage became her husband's on her wedding day, and she had no legal right to appear in court, to sign contracts or to do business. Although these formal provisions of the law were sometimes ignored—the wives of tradesmen, for example, might assist in running the family business—married women technically had almost no legal identity.