194 Pa. 210 | Pa. | 1899
Opinion by
The question is whether an agreement between plaintiff and defendants to exchange lands, executed jointly by husband and wife, defendants, but not separately acknowledged by the latter, is binding upon her.
Two subjects are presented for consideration, and a glance atour statutes makes it apparent that they have not been treated concurrently, but as distinct aud separate subjects for legislation. The rights and powers of a married woman over her property have been substantially revolutionized in recent years, but the mode of exercising them in the alienation of her land has remained without change for, more than a century.
The common-law method of conveying land by feoffment with livery of seisin was very early found burdensome in the colony, and of course the aliening of a married woman’s land by fine and recovery was far more so. The act of 1715 substituted a simple deed of bargain and sale for a feoffment, by
The Act of April 11, 1848, P. L. 536, practically put an end to the husband’s common-law present estate in his wife’s land and assimilated her estate and possession to that of a feme sole, but it saved to the husband his right to courtesy, and made no change in the mode of conveyance of her land as required by the act of 1770 by joint deed with her husband and her own separate acknowledgment: Peck v. Ward, 18 Pa. 506; Miller v. Ruble, 107 Pa. 395. The Act of June 3, 1887, P. L. 332, was a further step in the same direction of enlarging the married woman’s right and control over her separate property, but it also, like the act of 1848, excepted the power to convey real estate without her husband’s joinder in the deed. And the present Act of June 8,1893, P. L. 344, which repealed and supplied the act of 1887, was intended to still further enlarge a married woman’s control over her separate estate, but it, like its predecessors, denied her power to mortgage or convey her land unless her husband join in the conveyance, and in section 2, which is a repetition and general enumeration of her powers, the exception is again made in the significant terms “ she may not execute or acknowledge a deed .... conveying her real property unless her husband join in such conveyance.”
Each of these remedial and enlarging acts it will be observed deals with the rights and powers of married women in regard to their separate property, but all of them agree in preserving unchanged the requirement that the husband must join in order to pass a valid title to real estate. There could not be a
A single illustration will show the danger of any other view. None of the recent statutes have any application to the conveyance by a man of his own land. He is still unable, if married, to pass a title clear of dower without the joint execution and separate acknowledgment of the deed by his wife. Yet, if the view now contended for were adopted, his importunity, or influence, or compulsion could effectually turn her land into money, and thus bring it within his reach, without the statutory safeguard which protects her release of a merely contingent and inchoate dower in his land. The protection afforded to the lesser right would be taken away entirely from the greater. There is nothing in the statutes to indicate that any such consequence was intended.
Judgment affirmed.