The first public defender of American women’s rights was the wife of the future number two president of the United States, John Adams. In hundreds of letters written to her many relatives and friends, Mrs. Abigail Adams argued that women deserved the same political, economic and social rights as men. In her most famous letter to her husband, who took an active part in the creation of the Declaration of Independence, she put it this way: “I wish you would not forget the Ladies and be more generous and benevolent to them than your predecessors. Do not put such boundless power over them in the hands of their husbands.” This wish, however, was not taken seriously, and in the newly proclaimed American republic women remained subordinate both legally and socially for many decades.
The system of British law inherited by the Americans meant that an unmarried woman could own property, sign contracts, sue and be sued. However, once married, she became “one” with her husband, relinquishing both her family name and her property to the control of her husband. In the laws governing crime and other social spheres there was also an asymmetry not in favor of women. For example, a wife who killed her husband was subject to the article on premeditated murder, while a husband who killed his wife was subject to a milder article, “crime of passion. Female prostitutes were punished, but their male clients were not. Married women could not open a store credit separate from their husbands or take out a bank loan to buy a house, and divorced or unmarried women, although they had such rights, faced enormous difficulties in realizing them.
Under the influence of the women’s rights movement, laws were gradually changing toward justice. So, in 1969 the state of California became the first to adopt laws allowing divorce by mutual consent of spouses (before that in order to get a divorce one of the parties had to be guilty) and guaranteeing equal division of property, and by 1985 similar laws were adopted in all states. In 1974 a federal law was passed that prohibited financial institutions from discriminating against potential customers on the basis of gender, race, marital status, religion, national origin, age, or need for assistance (a euphemism for disabled people).
In 1976, for the first time in American jurisprudence, a family court in Nebraska declared domestic rape illegal. In 1994, the Violence Against Women Act was passed, resulting in increased penalties for sexual crimes, the establishment of special funds to assist victims of rape and domestic violence, and the introduction of special training programs for police officers. Nevertheless, the problem of violence against women is still one of the most acute, not only in the United States, but all over the world.