Sir, - Oh dear, Mary Maher's wrong again (November 8th)! The simplified procedure for determining property disputes between husband and wife was not introduced by the Married Women's Status Act of 1957, as she states. It too was brought in by the Married Women's Property Act of 1882.
To assert that these wrongs to women were still unredressed in the middle of the 20th century, and to compound the error by the inflammatory assertion that women marrying in Ireland before 1957 suffered a "civil death" (echoed editorially by your headline to her original piece), and not to recant wholeheartedly and frankly (including editorially) is an insult to those wonderful campaigners of the 19th century who fought for these reforms, and won - in particular, the feminist polemicist Caroline Norton (1808-1887, a grand-daughter of the dramatist Sheridan) who suffered as a mother and a wife.
Her marvellous tours de force English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854) and A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranford's Marriage and Divorce Bill (1855) have now been published on the internet by the Indiana University's Victorian Women Writers' Project Library [http://www.indiana.edu/ cgi-bin-ip/letrs/vwwwplib.pl]. - Yours, etc.,
Patrick Ussher, Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.