What is accomplished by denying en toto the fact that, prior to laws such as the Married Womens Property Acts, in many places, married women had few, if any, property rights, particularly as against their husbands?
Why fly in the face of history in attempting to score some minor little ideological point?
The basic fact of the matter is that historically, women, qua women, and particularly qua married women, suffered from substantial civil disabilities solely because of their sex and marital status?
That is a fact of history. The fact that the history was not uniform, but more checkered in terms of time, place, and individuals, does not change the underlying fact.
The fact that a number of the older states were compelled to enact Married Womens Property Laws, coupled with the fact that the younger western states, learning from the mistakes made by their older brethren, felt compelled to enshrine in their state constitutions the right of women to own property without regard to their marital status is more than sufficient proof that it was, in fact, a serious problem in the U.S., and not just some made-up unicorn fart from 1960s feminists.
The reason you, in the west, can recite those cute little anecdotes about Auntie Mae who owned a cowboy saloon all by her lonesome is precisely because, by the time those areas became inhabited territories and then states, the eastern states had already gone through the process of fighting the old guard on that issue, and the old guard had lost.
