The concluding chapter returns to the broader questions of the study, summarizes the main findings and considers the potential impact of these civil code reforms. South America followed two paths to reform of married women's property rights differentiated by whether these preceded or followed the development of a women's movement demanding rights and the political conjuncture. The influence of feminists on legal scholars and legislators was highly variable reflecting the heterogeneous pace of social change and political dynamics of each country. The broadest consensus was around working wives controlling their own earnings, explaining why it was the reform most uniformly adopted. Women's control over the property they brought to marriage or later inherited was more elusive, as was giving wives at least a say in the disposition of community property. Married women attained the strongest property rights in Colombia and Uruguay; the two that adopted the regime of deferred community property, in the latter, decades after women had achieved suffrage. Except in Uruguay, the strengthening of married women's property rights did not eliminate a husband's control over the person of his wife. The impact of these reforms depended on their scope, uptake and the social change to which they contributed.