Privy examination

---

title: "Privy examination" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["history-of-women's-rights-in-the-united-states", "property-law-in-the-united-states"] description: "American legal practice to protect married women" topic_path: "history" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privy_examination" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American legal practice to protect married women ::

A privy examination, or "separate examination", was a United States legal practice in which a married woman who wished to sell her property had to be separately examined by a judge or justice of the peace outside of the presence of her husband and asked if her husband was pressuring her into signing the document. This practice, which emerged from English common law, was seen as a means to protect married women's property from overbearing husbands. A number of U.S. states continued to require privy examinations into the late 20th century.

References

References

1. "Married Women's Property Laws". Law Library of Congress.
2. Jone Johnson Lewis. "Married Women's Property Act: 1848, New York State".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::