From the TSHA: Matrimonial Property Act of 1967 [Marital Property Act of 1967]

Specifically for HCC classes, but useful for our future look at civil rights policy.

- Click here for the entry.

The Matrimonial Property Act equalized spousal rights, liabilities, responsibilities, including management and control of community property, child custody, and financial responsibilities to the family. Often called the Marital Property Act of 1967, the bill was part of a larger set of reforms proposed initially by the State Bar of Texas as an alternative to passing the Equal Rights Amendment to the Texas Constitution (TERA).

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the State Bar officially opposed the TERA, in part, because they argued that it would create a domino effect of “havoc and uncertainty” with other laws without statutory reform. To modernize Texas’s laws regarding families and meet demands for spousal equality, the State Bar tasked their Family Law Section team with drafting the Matrimonial Property Act of 1967 and other legislation that revised and modernized laws regarding divorce, marriage, annulment, guardianship and adoption, custody, paternity, juvenile delinquency, and the family court system (see WOMEN AND THE LAW). By the mid-1970s the committee created the first modern comprehensive unified Family Code in the world. Louise B. Raggio chaired the drafting committee, whose members included attorneys W. Dewey Lawrence, Edwin Nesbitt, Richard H. Cory, William Carssow, and law professors Joseph W. McKnight, Eugene L. Smith, William O. Huie, William Fritz, Angus McSwain, and Loy Simpkins.

For More

- LOUISE B. RAGGIO (1919–2011).

- FAMILY CODE: TITLE 1. THE MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIP: SUBTITLE B. PROPERTY RIGHTS AND LIABILITIES: CHAPTER 3. MARITAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND LIABILITIES.

- Women and the Law.