that the United States cannot be regarded as one legal system as to the majority of types of law traditionally under state control, but must be regarded as 50 separate systems of tort law, family law, property law, contract law, criminal law, and so on. Marylynn Salmon argues that each state developed different ways of dealing with a variety of legal issues pertaining to women, especially in the case of property laws. In 1809, Connecticut was the first state to pass a law allowing women to write wills. In 1860, New York passed a revised Married Women's Property Act which gave women shared ownership of their children, allowing them to have a say in their children's wills, wages, and granting them the right to inherit property. Further advances and setbacks were experienced in New York and other states, but with each new win the feminists were able to use it as an example to apply more leverage on unyielding legislative bodies. White feminism Imperialism Anxiety in the United States over the moral degeneracy and temptation of American men in the Philippines inspired women's involvement in the politics of the colonial government. An article published in The Washington Post in 1900 describes the Philippines as an environment where relatively permissive conceptions of morality caused white men to "lose all notions of right and wrong". It was said that white men "disgraced the offices to which they had been appointed", and that, despite having left their homes "with records that were above reproach", they were "degenerated by the conditions of their new existence". Away from the social pressures imposed by their community, they did not possess the strength of moral character or principle needed to maintain the "social discipline". White women feminists, in this historical context, asserted their superiority over white men and brown women. They have in been criticized by modern women writers of color like Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar. Inequality In the First Wave context there are two different fights for the equal rights of white women and black women. White women were fighting for rights equal to white men in society. They wanted to correct the discrepancy in education, professional, property, economic, and voting rights. They also fought for birth control and abortion freedom. Black women, on the other hand, were facing both racism and sexism, contributing to an uphill struggle for black feminists. While White women could