Women had almost no legal rights in that era. They were completely under the will of either their husband or another male relative such as father or brother. Because they had no economic resources or political power they could easily be intimidated and threatened and frequently were. Truly, a woman did not even have a "home of her own." She lived in the home of her husband and whatever economic resources she had, they were legally controlled by her husband. It was very disadvantageous for a woman with any property to marry, as control and management of it immediately became the husband's. A married woman had no power at all and a single woman had very little. Without money an unmarried woman was at the mercy of relatives to whom she would serve as a household servant. If married, the revenues earned by her, wither independently or as part of the cooperative enterprise of the farm, were considered the property of the husband. In wills, when daughters were left property, both she and her husband had to sign. In the case of sons left property, their wives did not have any role whatever in it. All that a woman did had to be done with the "permission" of the husband. It was not true adulthood as we know it. The only place where a woman had anything like an identity was in the church (as a member only - not as part of the governing body) and the position of the churches was to persuade these women that their rightful place was in the subservient and powerless role. In the nineteenth century census records you will see numerous incidents of widowed women listed as household members in their former home under the "head of household" status of a son who may not even have reached majority. There are many books published on the subject of the legal and economic status of women in earlier times and there are links to many sites on the subject from the Womens Page which you can find in the Online Research Library of <A HREF="http://www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm">Tri-County Genealogy Site of Joyce M. Tice</A> Anyway, this is a well researched and well published historical discipline and many resources are available to document it. An excellent book is the Way of Duty which are the diaries of an eighteenth century woman who went through three marriages, in the third of which the fortune she had accumulated in the her lifetime was lost by her husband who had full control of it. Joyce M. Tice