There are two key components to securing married women's property rights as human rights: attaining the same property rights for married women as for single women and establishing equal rights between husband and wife in marriage. While these are interrelated, their attainment has followed different trajectories in Latin America and in countries of the common law tradition. What Latin America, the United Kingdom and the United States shared until the late nineteenth century was that the act of marriage changed a woman's property rights. Single women had almost the same property rights as single men, whereas married women did not. Where the two traditions differ is that up until the early nineteenth century, married women's property rights were stronger in Latin America than among their counterparts in the common law countries. This partly explains why the demand for securing for married women the same property rights as single women emerged much earlier in the United Kingdom and in the United States than in Latin America, and why these reforms were largely attained in common law countries during the second half of the nineteenth century.