This special issue has been curated by Dr Rebecca Mason, Economic History Society Power Fellow 2019-20 at the Institute of Historical Research. The issue provides a select overview of ground-breaking historical research on women, property and law, spanning the medieval to late modern period in a European context.
The included works cover a broad range of themes, and offer challenging perspectives on women’s contribution to social, economic and legal spheres across a wide range of jurisdictions and different time periods. Many of the selected works propose new approaches for the study of women, property and law. The works cover different aspects of women’s interaction with the law and provide new insights into women’s ability to negotiate the strictures of inheritance and marital property regimes. Women’s legal rights, and how those rights were understood, negotiated and circumvented in practice, have changed over time. The works unearth women’s legal status as property owners, challenging previous historical narratives that emphasised their legal incapacities as independent financiers and conduits of wealth and status. In these works, women are located as estate managers, household administrators, property investors, and the heads of local and international business enterprises. Focusing on women’s active engagement with property within a wide range of legal records, these works collectively dismantle the assumption that propertied status in the realm of law was exclusively reserved for men pre-20th century.
These ten works all use women’s legal status and rights to property as a lens through which to examine wider issues of class, age, gender, politics, economics, law and social change. Each work greatly enhances our understanding of gender, status and society in a historical and modern context.