Atwell, Mary Welek. Equal Protection of the Law?: Gender and Justice in the United States. New York: P. Lang, 2002.

Hoff-Wilson, Joan, 1937-. Law, Gender, And Injustice: A Legal History Of U.S. Women. New York: New York University Press, c1991.

Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

Schwarzenbach, Sibyl A., and Patricia Smith, eds. Women and the United States Constitution: History, Interpretation, And Practice. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Wortman, Marlene Stein. Women in American Law. Vol. I: From colonial times to the New Deal. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985-1991.

The online Houghton Mifflin Companion provides a helpful summary of changes in the legal status of women over the last three centuries:

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/ html/wh_020600_legalstatus.htm

On women’s rights to real property, read Marylynn Salmon’s Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c1986.

About.com has a very nice section on women’s property rights, complete with links to good definitions of dower and couverture, and the full text of the 1848 New York Married Women’s Property Act:

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/marriedwomensproperty/ a/property_rights.htm

For the history of child custody in the United States, see:

Mason, Mary Ann. From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, c1994.

You’ll find the Houghton Mifflin Companion to Women’s History useful here. It offers a good summary of evolution of modern laws of marriage and divorce:

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/ html/wh_010100_divorceandcu.htm

It also addresses the concept of “separate spheres”:

http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/women/ html/wh_033100_separatesphe.htm

For the concept of "moral motherhood," see:

Bloch, Ruth H. “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815.” Feminist Studies. 4(June 1978): 101-126.