The Mississippi Married Women's Property Acts of 1839, 1846, and 1857 reflected the desire of the Mississippi patriarchy to protect themselves from economic instabilities. Analysis of women's deeds in Jefferson county, Mississippi, from 1792 to 1871 and the rulings of the Mississippi High Court of Error and Appeals demonstrate the patriarchy's attempt to balance their desire for preservation of power with honor's demands that patriarchs provide for their families. The MWPA gave women the right to own property in their own names but restricted their ability to use and alienate that property. This made women property owners in name only, an action that preserved a portion of a family's estate which husbands controlled but which could not be taken from them. Women benefited in small ways from men's desire to protect personal wealth in Jefferson county. Women's property transactions there rose over the century—the increase roughly correlating with the passage of the 1839 law and its amendments. Court cases reveal that men and women acted as it best suited them financially employing the MWPA pragmatically rather than deliberately to widen women's sphere. The 1846 amendment essentially constitutes the legislature's response to these individual interpretations of the law, and the 1857 amendment is a digest of further additions and clarifications of the MWPA by the High Court itself. Legislative action and High Court rulings clarify the intent behind the MWPA regarding women's place and role in family and society. It is evident that the design of the law was not to bring gender equality to property law or to recognize the wife as a separate entity within the marriage This is the message of the various versions of the Mississippi MWPA and the resultant court decisions: vesting property in an inert owner ensures that it will be safe from the claims of predacious creditors and therefore available in perpetuity. The Mississippi MWPA in essence designated married women as a sure investment for their families' financial preservation.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, American jurisprudence grappled with the issue of marital property. States under the Anglo-American legal tradition of common law revised marital property allocations to allow wives to hold certain categories of property separate from their husbands. These changes were enacted, in part, to insulate a wife's property from the vagaries of the market but the judicial response reveals a larger narrative of ambivalence and anxiety about women, property, and the suggested mobility of separately held possessions. Marital property reform begins in an historical moment when the question of what a woman could own in marriage morphed into larger cultural anxieties such as the very meaning of ownership and things themselves in the face of new intangible properties. Writers of fiction also captured these anxieties, and created imagined scenarios of marriage and property to expose constructions of ownership, property, womanhood, and marriage. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening attempts her withdrawal from her marriage by dismantling the Pontellier home and removing what she believes she owns to a separate physical space. The tragedy of her story can be understood for its legal impossibility under common law, as well as the restricted meanings of marriage and separate property under Louisiana's civil law jurisdiction. At the end of Edith Wharton's Summer, Charity Royall chooses to secretly reclaim a brooch that was a gift from her lover. Her action suggests a desire for privacy and could be viewed as fraudulent to her marriage vows. Pauline Hopkins's character Hagar in Hagar's Daughter repossesses material spaces in which she was forbidden to own and control because of her race and gender, and uses the American justice system to support her claims to ownership and contractual rights. In contrast to Hopkins's tenuous but nonetheless optimistic portrayal of contract, Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton's novel Who Would Have Thought It? describes contract and the American legal system overall as empty promises. Marriage and property in Ruiz de Burton's novel work as tropes through which to critique nineteenth-century American society and the destructive force of capitalism within its most intimate spaces.