They have their origin in the belief in "The imprudence, the frailty, and the imbecility" of women, to quote from this Code Napoleon.
Whatever women's legal disabilities in the United States, their laws were never based on the principle that women were imprudent, frail, or imbecile.

They placed women at a distinct disadvantage, it is true, but it was the disadvantage of the minor child and not of the inferior, the chattel, the property of man, as in Europe.
Laws in the United States were founded on the assumption that women stood in perpetual need of protection.

The law makers carried this to the absurd extent of assuming that protection was all the right a woman needed or all she ought to claim.

They even pretended that when a woman entered the complete protection of the married state she no longer stood in need of an identity apart from her husband.

The working out of this theory in a democracy was far from ideal, as we shall see..