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National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 15355, September, Raquel Fernández (2009).

This study develops a model of how women’s rights evolve over the course of economic development due to changing household and societal male interests, and tests the model against data on the timing of women’s rights acts from the United States in the 1800s.

In this paper, Fernández asks the question of, why and how did married women eventually obtain property rights?  One hypothesis is that economic development—i.e. the historical process of capital accumulation and declining fertility—changed male interests in terms of women’s rights. Fernández posits that “although men in general benefitted from a patriarchal society in which women enjoyed few economic and political rights, they also suffered from the welfare consequences of such a system for their daughters” (1). Fernández advances the argument that “at a sufficiently high level of wealth and/or at a sufficiently low level of fertility, a man’s conflicting interests in his role as a husband relative to those in his capacity as a father were resolved in favor of the latter” (1). Fernández develops a model of this hypothesis and tests it against a sample of ready data: the timing of married women’s property acts in the United States, which began in the 1840s and was mostly complete (i.e. with the exception of four states) by the 1920s.  Massachusetts was the first state to formally grant property rights to women in 1846 and Louisiana the last in 1980.

Several surprising implications emerge from the model.  First, increasing wealth will initially decrease male interests in women’s rights, and then increase them past a certain wealth threshold.  Second, low fertility rates should lead to earlier gains in women’s rights.  Third, states that start out with more women’s rights can expect property rights reform later than those that do not.

Some other scholars have also argued that men granted women rights for reasons of self interest.  Some have argued, for instance, that women faced low incentives for effort when they could not own property, an economic inefficiency which increased with greater levels of capital accumulation. 

Fernández uses a dataset of legal treatises and state session laws that indicates when property acts bestowed women with control of their separate estate and earnings.  Using various statistical methods, she finds strong support for her thesis.  As US states were developing in the 1800s, there was a strong negative correlation between fertility and reform.  She concludes that “The main intuition delivered by the model is that wealth accumulation or falling fertility alters the relative benefits of a patriarchal system relative to one in which women have property rights.  Under the patriarchal regime, both factors improve the welfare of sons more than the welfare of daughters.  At some critical level of fertility or capital, the disparity in the welfare of daughters versus sons implies that a father would be made better off sacrificing the consumption benefits he obtains from being selfish with his wife in order to ensure that his sons-in-laws are forced to be generous towards his daughters.  This critical level comes sooner in regimes that are less beneficial to women (e.g., those that follow English common law relative to community property law), as their daughters fare less well there, exacerbating the need for reform” (37).

This model has implications for women in today’s developing world.  In particular, policies and technologies that reduce fertility may help improve women’s economic position.