Chapter 2 Women, land and property
This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law.The first part of the chapter outlines single, widowed and married women's legalposition as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogenitureand coverture and their impact on women's...
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[Verlagsort nicht ermittelbar]
Routledge
2018
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This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law.The first part of the chapter outlines single, widowed and married women's legalposition as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogenitureand coverture and their impact on women's property rights. It exploresthe circumstances by which women most commonly became landowners, outliningthe four main routes to landownership for women, as well as the practicesby which married women were sometimes able to circumvent the restrictions ofcoverture. As a corollary to this, it also explores the impact of various changesto the early modern legal system - including the shift from dower to jointurearrangements, the emergence of strict settlement and the declining power of theecclesiastical courts - on women's property rights.The second half of the chapter sets out to assess the significance of womenas a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women'slandholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using a large sampleof data drawn from the parliamentary enclosure awards. In doing so, it respondsto considerable uncertainty about the scale of women's property ownership.Little quantitative information is available on the proportion of land owned bywomen, although a handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examinefemale landholding - as opposed to landownership - within small groups ofmanors. The results of the sampled enclosure awards are presented below, comparisonsbetween this data and the earlier, smaller studies explored, and the newdata used to throw light on four key issues: the legal and marital status of femalelandowners, the scale of individual female landowners' holdings, the geographyof female landownership and the thorny issue of change over time
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- English
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9781409456025
9781315579078 - Zugangseinschränkungen:
- Open Access
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