Women and Property in the Long Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The anonymous author of The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735) wrote the following about English property law: 'I have been informed by Persons of great Integrity, who have long resided in Portugal […] that a Wife in Portugal if she brought never a Farthing, has Power to dispose of half her Husband's Estate by Will; whereas a Woman by our Law alienates all her own Property so entirely by Marriage, that if she brought an hundred thousand Pounds in Money, she cannot bequeath one single Penny'. 1 This author thus complained about the injustice of English law with regard to women's property rights, especially when compared to other European countries. It is undeniable that English law severely restricted women's access to property, both portable and non-portable. It would take another one and a half centuries for the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, which constituted the watershed moment in which married women's rights to their own property finally became law.Women, however, had been establishing powerful relationships towards property long before the change in the law. By placing a particular focus on non-portable propertyland, the house and the estatethis special issue will explore the complexity of women's relationships towards this form of property. Originating from the workshop of the same title at the University of Warwick, this issue joins together the work of established and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, human geographies and literature. This collection of articles thus distinguishes itself for its multi-disciplinarity by creating a dialogue between scholars who are united by their interest in the interconnections between gender and property, in order to encourage a fruitful discussion on what has become one of the most significant areas of enquiry in recent years.Systems of inheritance, as the author of The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives indicates, have been a much-debated issue in England from the sixteenth century. While several countries in Europe had partible inheritance, England had primogeniture, believed by many to be a deeply unfair system. As calls for its revision and even modification became more common, criticism of primogeniture remained, although it tended to be limited to the harm it caused younger sons, rather than daughters. 2 Under English law, unmarried women and widows had the same rights to property, but married women were bound by coverture, a doctrine that treated the married couple as one economic unit and which granted the husband control over the woman's property and personal assets. The husband was also legally entitled to receive the rental income from any property belonging to his wife, whereas she would not be able to sell it or rent it without his permission. 3 Common law, which pertained exclusively to real propertyland or buildingsstated that in the absence of a will, property would be left to the eldest son, according to the principle of primogeniture, daughters inheriting jointly in the ab...