Pat, it is not that you may be misunderstanding me, I think we 
talking about different things. As the cliche goes, we are not on the 
same page. I believe what you called legal rights could be 
interpreted as formal rights/freedoms. As for the sexual division of 
labor, it exists. In a system of natural liberty it does not get 
mentioned because it is nor part of the analytical framework Smith 
had created. T. E. Cliffe Leslie, somewhat critical of his deductive 
method, wrote:

"Alike in the theory of Nature which pervades his entire philosophy 
of society, and in his general conceptions of the industrial world, 
we trace the influence of the early world in which he lived. One 
striking example of this is that one-half of society has been almost 
entirely overlooked in his philosophy. His language appears at first 
sight to point to unrestricted liberty as the unconditional principle 
of a true political economy, and the -indispensable requisite of the 
full development of the economic resources of nature; but on closer 
inspection it will be found that where he speaks of `the natural 
effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered 
to exert itself with freedom and security,' as the cause of national 
wealth and prosperity, he had only the half of the nation denoted by 
the masculine pronoun in his mind; he meant only what he elsewhere 
says, `the natural effort of every man.' He seems to have been 
perfectly content though it involves an inconsistency which is fatal 
to his whole theory with the existing restraints on the energies of 
women; and the only effort on the part of a woman to better her own 
condition which he has in view is `to become the mistress of a 
family.' In the only passage in the `Wealth of Nations' in which 
women are referred to, we discover at once how far was he from having 
developed universal laws of industry and wealth, how far he was from 
escaping from the ideas of a primitive world. `There are,' he said, 
`no public institutions for the education of women, and there is 
accordingly nothing useless, absurd, or fantastical, in the common 
course of their education. They are taught what their parents or 
guardians judge it necessary or useful for them to learn, and they 
are taught nothing else. Every part of their education tends 
evidently to some useful purpose either to improve the natural 
attractions of their person, or to form their minds to reserve, to 
modesty, to chastity, and to economy; to render them both likely to 
become the mistresses of a family, and to behave properly when they 
have become such. In every part of her life a woman feels same 
convenience or advantage from every part of her education.'

Although `the obvious and simple system of natural liberty' is the 
foundation of Smith's whole system, though he regarded it as the law 
of the beneficent Author of Nature, it turns out that he applied it 
only to one-half of mankind" (The Political Economy of Adam Smith, 
Fortnightly Review, 1870).

Sumitra Shah