Women, Money, and the Law: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Gender, and the Courts

Chapter Seven: Economics and the Law in Fiction: Fern, Tyler, Oakes Smith, Chesebro’, Phelps, Stoddard, Child, Davis, Ruiz de Burton, & Winnemucca Hopkins

Although nineteenth-century American women were proscribed from active involvement in the law in an o≈cial capacity—they could not practice as lawyers, obtain judgeships, or serve on juries—nevertheless, as the court cases in this study indicate, many women were involved in legal matters. Since nineteenth-century culture constructed women as acquiescent and domestic, outside the marketplace or “public sphere,” and since only high-profile legal cases would have received much publicity , to what extent were women in general aware of or interested in legal matters? Of course there is no way to obtain a statistical count by doing an opinion poll as one might today in order to determine the consciousness level or attitudes of a particular demographic group on an issue. However, it is possible to obtain a sense of what at least some women were thinking. One way in which we can gain insight into women’s consciousness of and attitudes toward legal matters is to look at women’s fiction. This chapter is intended as only a partial survey, of course, but, taken together, these texts—representing diΩerent perspectives, deriving from a broad span of time, and looked at in conjunction with the texts already discussed—provide a useful barometer of some contemporary women’s ideas respecting the law and its relationship to women and money. Economics and the Law in Fiction Fern, Tyler, Oakes Smith, Chesebro’, Phelps, Stoddard, Child, Davis, Ruiz de Burton, and Winnemucca Hopkins chapter seven This discussion of law in literature reveals how closely conjoined legal and economic interests were for nineteenth-century women, even when the connection was carefully hidden away underneath the conventional rhetoric of femininity and domesticity, as in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World, in which all of the action ensues from the loss of a lawsuit and the consequent loss of money. The law was not a prominent theme in most women’s fiction—which is consistent with cultural proscriptions and the social construction of womanhood—but a number of works include significant portrayals of and references to legal matters that were specifically of importance to women, and other works raise legal questions that aΩected both men and women. The fact that women writers tackled these subjects at all indicates that some women—both the writers and their readers—were aware of and interested in legal questions. And in all of these works, whether the focus is on legal or economic concerns , the two are clearly related, either directly or by implication. Legal questions appear in these fictional works in principally three ways. The most common way centers on women’s vulnerability before the law because of their ignorance of the law, because of the negative impact of laws on women, and because of specific legal restrictions based on gender. The second—and least common—way in which women writers treat the law is to portray women’s active involvement in legal issues either as plaintiΩs or defendants. And the third way in which the law figures in fiction is in the portrayal of injustices of the law in relation to issues that are not gender-specific, for example, in relation to slavery and issues of class or ethnicity. The issue most often portrayed, particularly before the passage of later Married Women’s Property acts that gave women control of their own money, was the question of women’s vulnerability under the law. One of the most salient nineteenth-century fictional treatments of the dangers of women’s legal ignorance and vulnerability appears in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1855), which reflects Fern’s own metamorphosis from an ignorant innocent with respect to both legal and economic questions to a savvy businesswoman who makes it her business to know her legal rights. Ruth has several encounters with legal issues, and Fern shows how she becomes more knowledgeable about the law as she becomes more economics and the law in fiction • 2 1 7 experienced. Immediately after Harry Hall’s death, when Ruth is at her most vulnerable, her husband’s friend Tom Develin takes advantage of her ignorance of the law. Her father-in-law has requested Harry’s clothes, and although legally the widow is entitled to her husband’s personal eΩects, Develin wants to please Dr. Hall because Hall is wealthy and influential whereas Ruth is a poor widow with no influence. Develin’s thoughts run thus: “The law is...