Women and Property: Women as Property

Women and Property: Women as Property Patricia Crawford In early m o d e m England the nature of property was complex. Property included land, goods and possessions, estate real and personal. Property extended to a person's body, and whether a w o m a n or m a n was free or enslaved. In addition, property had a spiritual dimension, as individuals owned their o w n souls. N e w 2 forms ofproperty were emerging, such as literary property. A s England became a more commercial society in the eighteenth century, credit was significant. Because property in its multifarious forms was increasingly important in English society, contemporaries usually took care to explain what they meant by the term. One way of understanding the nature of property is to think of it, as Brewer and Staves suggest, as 'a bundle of rights'. H o w ownership of i Acknowledgments: Many ofthese footnotes are to my already published work where fuller references may be found. Warmest thanks to friends for generously sharing unpublished papers, and for references, discussion, and comments, especially to Sue Broomhall, Mandy Capern, Conal Condren, A m y Erickson, Laura Gowing, Karen Pearlston, Philippa Maddern, Judith Richards, Sara Mendelson, Pam Sharpe, and Claire Walker. Thanks too 2 to the anonymous referees. John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds, Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: 3 Routledge, 1995), p. 2. Judith Richards, Lotte Mulligan, and John K. Graham, '"Property" and "People": Political Usages of Locke and Some Contemporaries', Journal ofthe History ofIdeas 42 (1981), 29-51. Brewer and Staves, eds, Early Modern Conceptions ofProperty, p. 16. 152 Patricia Crawford property was envisaged, and h o w contemporaries thought about it in connection with liberty, has engaged the interest of historians and political scientists. Yet h o w w o m e n related to property and h o w such relations ofproperty affected their social position has been less discussed. Three interlocking variables affected a woman's rights to property, the first of which was the status of the w o m a n herself. W o m e n themselves were no unitary category but rather individuals whose age, family of origin, nationality and marital status all affected their capacity to own property. Secondly, the law was no simple body ofrules, but rather a complex system ofjurisdictions in which precedents as well as theories played a role. Thirdly, property itself was of different kinds. The individual's rights to ownership were affected by the type of properly involved. Women's relationship to property was therefore complex, and what the law said was the case was not necessarily h o w women in practice related to property. First, the category of 'woman' was complex. A fundamental difference was between the single w o m a n and the married. Initially, at birth, it was widely claimed by lawyers, political theorists and popular writers that women were bom free. A s Sir Robert Filmer declared, virgins 'by birth have as much natural freedom as any other, and therefore ought not to lose their liberty without their own consent'. Earlier, in 1620, in a popular satirical pamphlet about the SheMan , Haec Vir, the mannish w o m a n made a remarkably similar claim: 'We are as freeborn as M e n , have as free election and as free spirits; w e are compounded of like parts and m a y with like liberty make benefit of our Creation.' Yet the assertion that w o m e n were born as equal as m e n was false so far as inheritances in general were concerned, for the law generally privileged sons over daughters. Even so, in some cases a daughter might be favoured over a more distant male 9 relative because of her 'nearness of blood' to her father. Paternity not maternity Laura Brace, The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-Century England: Tithes and Individual (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). Robert Filmer, Anarchy ofa Limited orMixed Monarchy in Patriarcha and Other Poli Works ed. Peter Laslett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949), p. 287. Haec Vir in Half Humankind: Texts and Contexts of the Controversy about Wome England, 1540-1640 ed. Katherine...