In her author’s Preface to The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, Wollstonecraft declares that her aim is to expose “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.”1 From her first major work, the Vindication of the Rights of Men, and throughout her writings, Wollstonecraft attacked the property system, upheld by numerous laws, which structured British society in the late eighteenth century, and where the dependent state of women was enshrined. The “prejudices of mankind” which, as Maria reflects in Wrongs of Woman, made women the “property of their husbands” was not merely a consequence of socially dominant ideologies of gender, but was formally instituted by property laws which, through the common-law notions of coverture and primogeniture, neither recognized the independent existence of a married woman, nor regarded daughters as equal in status and expectation to sons.2 This essay explores, first, the significance of property in eighteenth-century Britain; secondly, the complex legal landscape of property law; and finally the repeated and detailed criticisms, often of particular laws and their effects, which Wollstonecraft offered in her writing.