In the eyes of the law, single women and widows had full legal capacity. When considering women's rights it is consequently a mistake to study only those areas of the law obviously associated with women, such as jointure, dower, marriage settlements and separate estates. Such a focus can be misleading, for two reasons. First of all, it ignores the fact that in theory adult women without husbands were litigants like any others, free to go to court over the same issues as men. In practice this meant not just dower and jointure, but debts, bonds, contracts, property transactions, inheritance and a host of other matters. Secondly, for reasons connected with the legal restrictions wives suffered during marriage, women in sixteenth century England rarely played as dominant a role in litigating their own marriage settlements and separate estates as logic might suggest. They took part in marriage negotiations, but only occasionally did they participate in court actions when negotiated agreements failed.