Driving into Ann Arbor today, I heard a fascinating interview with an author of a new book called "The Great Divorce." It chronicles the life of Eunice Chapman, a woman who defied her husband, a powerful religious group, and the cultural mores of her times--the U.S. in the 19th century--to gain a divorce and control of her children. The interview is well worth a listen...if only to hear the author read from Chapman's powerful letters in which she states her rights emphatically.

What so captivated me as I listened to this woman's story was my sense of displacement and discouragement. My thoughts kept rollercoasting between "we have come so far" to "we haven't come very far at all." Certainly, we (by we I mean women of a certain socio-economic class in so-called first world countries) live in times where divorce is far more common--but not necessarily easier on us. A range of studies have shown that divorce has a negative impact on a woman's finances (although there are studies that show that there also is a negative impact on men as well.)

Without a doubt, women have gained far more control over their lives, their children, and their bodies in the past 200 years. But I still sense that both here in the U.S. and around the world that women continue to deal with the repercussions from a 19th century cultural and legal norm called "civil death." This term was used in the 19th century to describe what happens to a woman when she marries. When she marries, she becomes civilly dead, or non-existent in society.

I wondered what are the modern ramifications of this cultural and legal norm? How far do we have to go to put "civil death" behind us because I still perceive its hold on us some 200 years later. Despite all we have achieved, women in many countries become the property of their husbands when they wed. Even in countries where women have fought for independence, we continue to live with hangover of this "death." We still struggle to gain financial freedom and independence--whether it's fighting for higher pay or having that tough conversation with our partners about money.

So yes we have come very far from this 19th-century notion of being dead to our society because we were married. But I also realize that our path toward independence has been one that is tougher and far ore philosophically challenging than even I had imagined.