SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

esidence was where her husband lived. This statute provided an example of how Kansas law
and the population of Kansas subtly revoked the stronghold of coverture in American marriages.
By allowing women to own property, be residents of the state, and petition for divorce, Kansas
law stated a woman was legally her own person, not simply subsumed into the legal identity of
her husband.
Kansas divorce law allowed women to use divorce for their own individual purposes.
Two examples from Clay County, Kansas, provide unusually vivid examples of this possibility.
Ida Marion Selts and Bertha Holtzgang were proprietors of prominent businesses. These women
were typical in that, like the majority of women who filed for divorce, their husbands had
abandoned them. However, they were unique because they fought for their rights to maintain
ownership of property acquired during their marriages. Because of the remaining disadvantages
of coverture, we may assume that these women both worried that, if their husbands should ever
return, they could resume head-of-household status and take over the property and financial
assets that each woman had worked so hard for. Divorce provided these women with the legal
option to secure their finances in their own names. Thanks to the efforts of Clarina Nichols,
these Kansas women could legally retain their family’s property. Moreover, it appears that these
women did not face social ridicule but instead were accepted into society as prominent women.
The liberal Kansas divorce laws allowed these women to break the legal bonds of marriage and
prosper in spite of their divorce.
Mrs. Ida Selts was a well-respected member of the Clay Center community and a
successful business owner. After her husband abandoned her to be a traveling auctioneer, she
petitioned the court for a divorce. It seems likely that Mrs. Selts found her husband’s new career
to be a threat to the financial security that she had built up for the family through her successful
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