In 1852, the eleven-year-old daughter of University of Virginia (UVA) law professor John B. Minor identified herself on the flyleaf of her diary in big, bold script. The volume belonged to “Mary L. Minor” of the “University of Virginia.” It was prescient. The University of Virginia Law School was Mary’s life and her life’s work. She never married. She remained with her father, in Pavilion X, down from the Rotunda, and devoted her life to the support of his career, tending to the law students he taught. She took her duties seriously, to the point of using the law school’s stationery for her correspondence.Footnote ¹

Mary never received a dime for her labor. UVA did not have to pay. It acquired access to her through her father, a practice formalized in the requirement that professors provide their own staff – wives, children, enslaved people, and, after emancipation, hired servants – to cover all the work that came with the job. The university paid the professor, who assumed responsibility for the support of his household. John Minor, the professor in question, was fully on board with this arrangement. He spent his career promoting a legal construction of patriarchal authority in accordance with the university’s policies, one that concentrated power and resources in a single male household head. By that logic, Mary Minor’s relationship with the university ended with her father’s death in 1895. UVA immediately evicted Mary and her stepmother to make way for the new law professor and his domestic entourage. Mary’s experience mirrored that of one of her aunts, whose father, also a UVA law professor, was shot and killed in a student riot in the 1840s. As the aunt told the tale, the carriages that bore her father’s body to the cemetery stopped on the way back to carry the family away from their home, Pavilion X, where Mary would spend most of her adult life. It had a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-way-out quality that was hard to miss.Footnote ²

Back to Mary. After she and her stepmother left their home, they discovered that John B. Minor was much better at pontificating about the authority of fathers and husbands than he was at performing the associated duties. He left little, despite his professorship, a private practice, and several well-regarded publications. “I lament more than I can express the small provision which I have … for my dear family,” he wrote in his will. But then he waved away his responsibility: “They will remember however the losses I have sustained.” It never occurred to Minor that what was left in the estate was family property and not really his to give away – that it belonged as much to his daughters and wife, not to mention the unnamed domestic laborers, enslaved and free, as it did to him. So, Mary had to make do, piecing together a subsistence for herself and her stepmother, until her death some twenty years later.Footnote ³

I am haunted by Mary Minor’s story. It is a little odd because my work has never focused on privileged white women, and Mary is not a particularly sympathetic figure within that group. She is the kind of woman with a hat, gloves, and an outsized attitude, one who floats through the world obliviously, as if the benefits of her racial and class position were her due. But it did not turn out that way for Mary, which is why I cannot let her go and why I began this talk with her.

The life of Mary Minor and the women in her family complicate the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. Her own trajectory was hardly an upward arc because of legal changes, promoted by her own father, which lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of Mary’s life, in the late nineteenth century, neither Mary’s father nor Mary herself could imagine that family property to which she had contributed all her life might belong to her. In this way, Mary is representative of all the women who found themselves within the legal category “women,” a category that not only compromised their legal claims to property but also erased other, dramatic differences among the actual women placed in that category.Footnote ⁴

The location for much of the action is Virginia because that is where John B. Minor, Mary’s father, worked to shape the state’s legal order. But there is another reason for Virginia. The focus is there because Virginia is not the state usually associated with scholarly discussions of married women’s property or women’s rights; in fact, it was the last state to enact such legislation. The traditional narrative, enshrined by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Jocelyn Gage, in their monumental A History of Woman Suffrage, features New York. It all began there, in that state, where a handful of far-thinking women (most notably Stanton, Anthony, and Gage) realized the inequities of existing, outdated laws and demanded change. In 1848, they secured passage of the first married women’s property act: first because it was the first statute of its kind and first because it was the first time married women could own property in North America, or so they claimed. That act then led to the Seneca Falls Convention and the Declaration of Sentiments, which launched a nationwide movement. The rest is history.Footnote ⁵

History. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s narrative of progress depended on a view of history that collapsed past, present, and future. In the first volume of A History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1881, they insisted that their movement’s past made recognition of women’s rights inevitable, almost as if they were already a reality. In fact, progress on those goals had been minimal when they were writing. Turning those incremental gains into major victories required the right backdrop, which took the form of an incredibly bleak past, dominated by, in Stanton’s words, “a compound of barbarous usages.” She was referring to coverture, which she described as “the preposterous fiction of law, that in the eye of the law the husband and wife are one person, that person being the husband.”Footnote ⁶ That legal fiction, to use the words of another activist, “originated in the dark ages; in times of comparative intellectual ignorance, debasement and human vassalage, under an absolute and despotic feudal government and the auspices of mercenary men who were interested in … injustice.” With history like that, it did not take much to improve.Footnote ⁷

While opponents and supporters of coverture disagreed about its place in the present and future, they agreed on its history. They all saw contemporary statements of coverture as accurate renderings of past legal practice. That historical consensus speaks volumes about the importance of Sir William Blackstone and his treatise, Commentaries on the Laws of England, which laid out an incredibly influential version of coverture and wrapped it in the mantle of timelessness, disguising innovation as tradition. Coverture did have deep roots in English law. But it existed as a jumble of principles that could go in several different directions, depending on the context, which included other legal principles – more about those later. Blackstone, writing in the 1760s, fashioned a new synthesis that elevated the restrictions of coverture over other practices that allowed more legal space for married women. Then he closed off the exits, portraying his restrictive version of coverture as the way it had always been.Footnote ⁸

This new, restrictive version of coverture moved from treatises into legal practice in the new republic, reshaping law while denying anything was happening.Footnote ⁹ John B. Minor was one of many legal professionals who made that happen. Minor, who attended UVA law school before he taught there, read books and sat through lectures that presented Blackstone’s version of coverture as an already existing fact. In this, he was no different than other aspiring lawyers of his era. After completing their studies, all these lawyers went out and acted on what they had learned, embedding those principles at all levels of legal practice: in county courts, appellate decisions, and statutes.Footnote ¹⁰ When John B. Minor became the law professor at UVA, he built Blackstone’s vision of coverture into his lectures, which formed the basis for his influential treatises. As he wrote in 1877, “A Married Woman is one with her husband, and in law, her existence is merged in his,” which placed a married woman “under the constraint of her Husband.” That situation, Minor argued, reflected the natural order of things: “It is as true in fact, as it is in law.” What more needed to be said? It was as it had always been, was now, and forever intended to be. The present reflected the past and foretold the future (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Photo of John B. Minor in his study. Papers of the Venable Minor, Wilson, and Related Families (MSS 3750-d), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

The commitment to a Blackstonian version of coverture ran deep because it was never just about married women. This version of coverture was particularly well adapted to commercial relations because it clarified the terms of property ownership. It turned over the property of wives and their families, including their children, to those women’s husbands and, by extension, made that property available to those men and others to exploit. When buying, selling, and leveraging property, it was simpler when it belonged to a single individual, namely the rights-bearing man at a family’s head, who had few, if any restrictions on what he could do with it. Those individuals could leverage what they owned, as they wished. When they proved unable to meet their obligations, creditors could claim their due, without sorting through all the other pesky claims of family members. In this sense, coverture was compatible with an emerging body of legal rules that reduced all kinds of property to commodities, owned outright by individuals with the necessary rights. As John Minor’s students learned in one of his first lectures, property was inseparable from marriage. Together, they “consolidated the fundamental ground work of all society.” Nearly every aspect of his discussions of property law involved some reference to coverture because it was so central in defining ownership and its terms.Footnote ¹¹

Without coverture, property transfers became murky because of the power and presence of competing legal principles that operated alongside and in conversation with coverture throughout much of the early nineteenth century. These legal principles defined property in collective terms, kept it within natal families, and elevated familial claims over those of individual family members or their creditors. In this view, property was a resource to which all family members – through the generations – had claims. Ownership was more like stewardship, which placed limits on what owners could do. The present generation had use of the property, with the obligation to pass it on. Even then, ownership was not concentrated in a single individual because of other family members’ claims. As such, the person designated in law as the owner did not have the legal power to cut off other family members who contributed to the value of familial property and depended on it for support. By extension, creditors’ claims took a back seat to the claims of family members, including those of female family members.Footnote ¹²

These principles empowered families, not women as individuals, which was why women’s rights activists dismissed them as yet another means of denying married women’s status as individuals, just like rigid versions of coverture. As activist Paulina Wright Davis put it, “The rights and liberties of one human being can not be made the property of another.” Proponents of rigid versions of coverture focused on individuals as well, dismissing familial legal principles because they undercut a man’s individual control of household property. Historians have tended to follow suit. They have assumed that individual conceptions of property ownership were already ascendant by the early nineteenth century. To be sure, individual conceptions of property ownership were definitely in play and definitely powerful.Footnote ¹³

But familial conceptions of property also remained alive well into the late nineteenth century because they made sense. Extended families, not individuals, remained the primary unit for acquiring, managing, and transmitting wealth – as suggested by UVA’s presumption that the position of professor included the labor of wives and children. As UVA’s policies also suggest, women played central roles in these familial strategies. Despite the promises of rigid definitions of coverture, men needed help. A lot of it. Take St. George Tucker – a law professor at William and Mary, a treatise writer, a judge, and the father of Henry St. George Tucker who was a law professor at UVA before John B. Minor. Tucker’s legal accomplishments did not extend to his finances. In those matters, he leaned heavily on his first and second wives, both of whom had control of property – land, enslaved people, and other resources – from their own families and their first husbands. Both women – Frances Bland Randolph, Tucker’s first wife, and Lelia Skipwith Carter, his second wife – controlled property as representatives of their families: as daughters and mothers of their first husbands’ children. This legal logic shifted the focus away from married women’s position as wives and onto their extended families, where they were also mothers, grandmothers, aunts, daughters, sisters, and nieces. In those relationships, which were also legal relationships, women had legal claims on familial property. They also had recognized legal responsibilities for creating it, preserving it, and passing it along, just like other family members.Footnote ¹⁴

People in Virginia and elsewhere relied on these principles. Consider entail, which may sound archaic, but was widely used in Virginia to bypass coverture and creditors – which were related because coverture’s restrictions gave husbands control over the property of their wives’ families, which made that property liable to the claims of those husbands’ creditors. Entail provided a way out, by passing property through family members, even married women, giving them use for their lives, without rights of ownership. For instance, Virginian John Wayles willed his daughter, Martha, the use of large tracts of land during her life. The property then passed to her children and, through them, to Martha’s grandchildren and so forth, through the generations. No single person owned the land outright, but everyone could use it. The arrangement kept the property out of the hands of Martha’s husband, Thomas Jefferson, his creditors (of which there were many), and the creditors of John Wayles. Entail protected men from themselves.Footnote ¹⁵

Virginia outlawed entail in 1776, thanks to Thomas Jefferson, who characterized it as a feudal holdover that protected the lazy children of the elite, keeping both economic resources and political power in their undeserving (and unmanly) hands. It was a mischaracterization because it was not just the wealthy who relied on entail. Lots of people did it because it made sense and was easy to do. There was no complicated form or legal rigmarole. It was a matter of writing common sense into a deed or will. John Donaghee, for instance, relied on the basics of entail to pass a small town lot in Norfolk to his grandson and, through him, to future heirs. His grandson acquired use rights, with the lot protected from his creditors because his heirs already had claims on it. It was hardly a case of elite overreach. On the contrary, it was an effort to distribute resources to a young family member who could use the help. It privileged the claims and needs of the family over those of creditors.Footnote ¹⁶

Donaghee’s use of entail did not involve women. But coverture played a key role in shaping the implications of entail’s abolition. The 1776 statute that abolished it transformed all entailed property into fee simple property, the form with which we are all familiar, the one that lodges ownership in individuals. That transformation had the effect of dispossessing married women who happened to possess their family’s entailed property. Married women became owners in law, which meant that their husbands acquired control over that property through coverture. The point bears repeating. The statute took property belonging to a woman’s family and turned control over to that woman’s husband. That is exactly what happened to the property that John Wayles intended for his daughter, her children, and his grandchildren. It went to Thomas Jefferson and, ultimately, his creditors. Monticello, like so many estates in the new republic, was built on property that women brought to their marriages, but which we now see as belonging solely to their husbands.Footnote ¹⁷

Passage of the statute prohibiting entail seems like the end of the story – and it is usually treated that way, as one of many nails in the coffin of family property. But John Donaghee, the man who tried to secure property for his grandson, wrote his will in 1821, long after the statutory abolition of entail. Virginians like Donaghee kept trying to entail property after the 1776 statute because that is what they were accustomed to doing. Many probably had no idea that entail had been outlawed. There was little publicity of the statute when it passed. Even if they knew, they did not necessarily know that what they were doing was entail. It was just what they did. So, they kept doing it. That explains an entire treatise on the rules of entail, published in 1837 by the UVA law professor who was killed in a student riot and who taught John B. Minor. Minor included a section on spotting and eliminating entail in his 1877 treatise. Cases involving entail continued to appear on court dockets in Virginia into the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸

Entail opens a window to a whole world of principles and practices in the new republic intended to keep property in the hands of family members. It was not just Virginians. People throughout the new United States regularly put those plans into various “written instruments”: wills, deeds, indentures, settlements, and agreements, all of which could modify other laws, including the restrictions of coverture, that took property out of family members’ hands.

Husbands, for instance, regularly willed the property of their wives and daughters back to them – usually linens, crockery, plate, china, and furniture as well as livestock, such as chickens and cows, all the kind of property that women generally brought into a marriage or accumulated with the proceeds of their own labor. Husbands sometimes put it in exactly those terms: I will the property that belongs to my wife back to her. Jacob Landis, in Philadelphia, wished his wife “to have and to take with her all the household goods as she brought at the time when we whear [sic] married with her Beddings and all the flax tow and Linnen and yarn with all her cloths to have and to hold for her one [sic] use and disposal forever.”Footnote ¹⁹

What sounds like patriarchal presumptuousness was actually a savvy legal end run around rules that privileged husbands and creditors. Everyone knew that some things in the household belonged to married women. But when her husband died, the restrictions of coverture kicked in. At that point, standard Anglo-American legal practice defined everything as his property and part of his estate, the proceeds of which went first to creditors and then to family members. There was nothing to be done at that point. When Mary Minor’s uncle died, for instance, his widow and daughters were charged with completing the inventory. Room by room, page after page, they carefully described and valued the contents of their house, an act of listing that moved the property they considered theirs into their father’s estate. Everything was then sold to pay his debts, of which there were many. It must have been excruciating. As Mary’s father, John B. Minor, noted, his brother left “a widow and 10 children … very slenderly provided for.” He hoped that God would help them. It was what other men tried to avoid with bequests that separated their wives’ and daughters’ property from their estates.Footnote ²⁰

Other people used deeds to accomplish similar ends, conveying property to family members before their deaths, when it became subject to the claims of creditors. Of course, creditors’ claims applied before an owner’s death as well. But deeds were harder to challenge than wills for a variety of reasons. The kinds of property deeded away were similar to what husbands willed back: tables and chairs, chickens and cows, looms and spinning wheels. These utterly ordinary goods were painfully important, and people went out of their way to make sure that they stayed with the family members who were intended to have them.Footnote ²¹

Many of these written instruments kept property in women’s hands through “separate estates.” The concept was based on a body of law called equity, which made it legally possible to keep a married woman’s property separate from that of her husband. In theory, that separation required the creation of a trust, the logic being that the trust owned the property (not the married woman), and a trustee managed it (not the married woman). In practice, the terms of the trust determined the extent of a woman’s control. The involvement of trustees varied widely, to the point where they did nothing at all, leaving married women to manage the property themselves. In some instances, women served as their own trustees, which was considered perfectly legal, because they were managing the property in their legal capacity as trustees and not as married women. In others, the whole fiction of a trust was dispensed with altogether, meaning that married women just managed the property.Footnote ²²

The wealthy made liberal use of separate estates. But so did other people. One father, who had two modest tracts of land, set up a separate estate in the traditional way, by making it clear that the property was to remain with his married daughter. As he stated, her husband was “not capable of conducting his own affairs” and was, therefore, “entirely excluded.” The father did not come out and say that his daughter’s husband was a complete dolt. But that was the implication, and that was how it went, until the doltish husband’s death, when his relatives saw an opportunity to seize the property. As they argued, the property had always belonged to this man because coverture made it impossible to give it to a married woman in this way. The father’s wording did cause the presiding judge consternation. It is just “awkward,” he fretted. He had good reason. By the time of the court case, in 1842, legal professionals had created elaborate rules regarding the creation and management of separate estates as well as bequests to women, all of which tended to invalidate the simple, straightforward language of this father. In this instance, the judge felt confident in upholding the father’s wishes, which left the property in the hands of his family, where he wanted it to be. But that was not always the case by the 1840s.Footnote ²³

The idea that women brought resources to their families, produced value during their lives, and had claims to familial property found expression in other legal principles as well. Significantly, married women could maintain legal control of the goods they produced or purchased with the proceeds of their own labor – which was also why it was so devastating when those items were taken from them in the settlement of estates. While women’s economic contributions have been dismissed then and now as “domestic labor” that had no value, much of that work is better described as small-scale business activity that kept families afloat. The female members of Mary Minor’s extended, utterly middle-class family all worked. They were teachers and nurses, boarding house keepers, seamstresses, and purveyors of butter, eggs, and produce. Such activities meant that some married women were conducting business in their own names. In fact, married women in Virginia could acquire the status of independent traders by acting as independent traders. Practice made it legal. The presumption was that it must be legal because they were doing it; otherwise, they would not be doing it.Footnote ²⁴

All the legal strategies that kept property in the family’s hands created a nightmare for business interests. It was unclear who owned what, and in what way. Figuring that out meant tracking down various written instruments and then parsing their meaning or, more frustrating, making inferences from practice. Did a man really own property? Or was it in the control of his wife? Or were his children really the ones with claims? Creditors were routinely caught out by familial strategies. To them, those strategies looked like efforts to defraud them, and they were not wrong. That was kind of the point.

Enter Virginia’s lawmakers, many of whom were lawyers whose business involved commercial transactions and who had the power to define the state’s law in ways that ordinary Virginians did not. Over the course of the nineteenth century, lawmakers whacked away at the thicket of principles and practices that made it possible to disperse property within families, without giving any individual full control over it. They made it more difficult to create and manage separate estates. They made it more cumbersome to deal legally or economically with married women. They dialed back legal claims to property that married women had enjoyed. They made it easier for married women to surrender their claims on family property to their husbands. They made it difficult to will property through generations. And they enforced existing fraud statutes to police familial legal strategies while minimizing the negative implications for creditors.Footnote ²⁵

All these measures had the effect of undermining women’s legal connections to family property. Within the familial logic, women had claims to property themselves, although as members of families. The individual logic put the emphasis on married women’s status as wives with claims only to maintenance, which husbands provided out of their property, not from property that belonged collectively to the family. Awareness of these legal changes registered in the defensive tone of wills and other written instruments. One man went with repetition. The property he willed to his wife, he wrote, “shall remain [her] property … and shall be totally at her disposal … [and she] can claim all as her property with a perfect right and she shall have solely the perfect right to act [on the] property according to her free will.”Footnote ²⁶ This man feared that his bequests to his wife and daughters were uncertain. He was right. In the emerging legal world, the claims of women to property, particularly the claims of married women, were rendered illegitimate. At best, those claims were charity; at worst, they were parasitical, with women making demands on property that was not really theirs. Men were the ones who owned property and distributed it within their families. They were the individuals who made their own way in the world. As such, they should not be dependent on their wives’ property. Dependency was the position of women (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

“A Meeting of Creditors,” 1795, Isaac Cruikshank. Yale Center for British Art.

From there, it was a short hop to fraud. The joke in this cartoon is that this man’s creditors are women. As the redness of his cheeks indicates, he is embarrassed, a term that referred generally to economic failure, but that invoked much more in this context. By recognizing the property claims of all these women, he had been ruined and emasculated. As John B. Minor taught his students, separate estates and other legal mechanisms that put resources in women’s names were, primarily, a means for husbands to evade their debts. Lawyers kept a lookout, as did John B. Minor in his own private practice. His work diary from the 1850s is filled with notes on all the various means of defrauding creditors by conveying property to wives. The fact of a woman with property was the first sign of trouble: it signaled the possibility of some illegal scheme. Minor’s concerns found expression in case after case in Virginia court, where creditors accused those indebted to them of transferring property to their female relatives in order to defraud them. What was a legitimate means of shielding family property in one context became fraud in another. When women had property, it was legally suspicious. It always had the whiff of something off, perhaps something fraudulent.Footnote ²⁷

The discussion surrounding Virginia’s 1877 married women’s property act captures that changing legal context. The act automatically shielded some forms of property from seizure by placing it in the names of married women, without having to set up a separate estate. In one sense, the act was just another means of doing what Virginians had always been doing. Context explains its passage. State legislators had been debating similar measures since the 1840s but had not acted because there was no real need, given all the other means of keeping property within families, away from creditors. By 1877, there was need. Virginia had been devastated by the Civil War and was mired in a deep recession. By that time, the traditional mechanisms for preserving family property had been made cumbersome, unreliable, and outright illegal. In that context, the married women’s property act was an attempt to preserve longstanding principles that kept property in families’ hands.Footnote ²⁸

But this act was also different, because of the erasure of those other legal principles that had supported familial legal strategies. Proponents argued that it was akin to social welfare; that it secured support for women when their husbands fell down on the job. Opponents insisted that any diminution of husbands’ authority would lead to the dissolution of families. But both sides focused on married women as wives, who were the economic responsibility of their husbands. (Given emancipation and the poverty of many white families, that stance was no coincidence, since it relieved local communities of the burden of poor relief.) Completely absent were longstanding legal practices and principles that positioned married women as members of families and gave them more varied, more robust claims to family property.Footnote ²⁹

Judicial interpretations of that act and subsequent revisions reinforced married women’s separation from family property, which remained firmly in the husbands’ hands. By 1900, married women could claim wages earned outside the household and could contract on their own property in their own names. But they could not claim the value of anything they produced within their households or that they added to their households with their wages or even their separate property. If they paid off the mortgage, the house still belonged to their husbands and could be claimed by his creditors. If they bought goods for their families’ use, those things belonged to their husbands and could be claimed by their creditors. If they used their property to buy food or medicine for their families on a regular basis, the courts interpreted that pattern as an ongoing transfer to the husband, and they lost claim to everything, even property that was still kept separate. But it was not just wealthy white women who suffered. This legal logic fell most heavily on women, white and Black, who lived on the economic margins and whose families relied on their labor. The property that they had secured, their homes and household goods, could be seized for their husbands’ debts, sometimes debts about which they had no knowledge. Their race and class made them vulnerable, but their legal status as married women is what ultimately did them in.Footnote ³⁰

The limitations on married women implicated unmarried women as well because marriage was never an on-off switch. It was a state that women cycled into and out of throughout the course of their lives. And a person could not tell if a woman was married or not simply by looking at her. She might be. But maybe not. Or she might be getting married soon. It was hard to tell. When men presented themselves to creditors, it was presumed that they had the full array of rights necessary to own and control property, which meant that they could be held legally liable for its management. That was not the case with women, because their legal capacity depended on their marital status, which was frustratingly unknowable. Best to steer clear, which is what commercial concerns did, until the late twentieth century.Footnote ³¹

Even as the restrictions of coverture simplified exchange in a commercial economy, they created deeply gendered, structural inequalities that made it difficult for all women to accumulate wealth, manage it, and pass it along to the next generation. For individual women, even white women from privileged families, the results ranged from uncertainty to downright impoverishment – which brings us back to Mary Minor. After her father’s death, Mary purchased a small house, which she rented out to produce an income stream, reserving one bedroom on the ground floor for her own use. In the last years of her life, she took in her impoverished widowed stepsister, Susan Colston Minor Wilson, and Susan’s three children, although it was as much about business as it was about charity. In an agreement carefully laid out in legal documents, Mary gave her stepsister the house rent-free and paid a nominal monthly sum for meals, cleaning, and other personal services. In other words, Mary Minor drew down the capital in her house to cover the care she needed in her old age, while also giving her sister a home.Footnote ³²

But there is more. Mary willed the remainder of her estate to her stepsister’s eldest daughter, her niece, also named Susan, while also allowing her stepsister the use of the house until the niece came of age. The arrangement owed to the estate of her stepsister’s husband, which was tied up with debt. Mary, who had learned her legal lessons well, wanted to keep family property out of the hands of creditors, who might seize it if it went to the stepsister. Anticipation of creditors’ demands may also have been why Mary specified that her stepsister could live in the house until her daughter came of age. It was entirely possible that the court might have mandated the sale of the house to cover Susan’s needs, leaving her mother and the other children homeless. With this small legacy, the niece Susan made a life for herself (Figure 3).Footnote ³³

Figure 3.

Susan Colston Wilson as a WAVE in World War II. Papers of the Venable Minor, Wilson, and Related Families (MSS 3750-d), Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

And so, we are left with Mary Minor as the keeper of a legal tradition of family property that stands in opposition to the one created by the father whose career she supported. Mary was as much a legal scholar as her father. She drew on a long history of legal arrangements that kept property in families and recognized the claims of women to family property. In using that past, she did what her male relatives failed to do. She took care of her family and kept property in the hands of her female relatives. It is a legacy that deserves our renewed attention today.