Women and the Land, 1500-1900

Description

Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularly for women. The focus is especially on land, residential buildings and commercial property, but livestock, common and personal property also feature. This project is driven by an explicitly feminist agenda: the contributors directly challenge the idea that the existence of patriarchal property relations - including the doctrine of coverture and gendered inheritance practices - meant that property was concentrated in exclusively male hands. Here a very different story is told: of significant levels of female landownership and how women's desire to own property and manage its profits led to emotional attachments to land and a willingness and determination to fight for the right to legal title. Altogether, the chapters in this volume offer new histories of land and property which hold women's lives as their centre. Presenting the very latest qualitative and quantitative research on women's landownership, the book will be of interest to those working in social, economic and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, women's studies, gender studies and landscape studies. Contents List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction: Women, Property and Land • Briony McDonagh, Amanda L. Capern, Jennifer Aston and Hannah Worthen 1. Women, Work and Land: The Spatial Dynamics of Gender Relations in Early Modern England 1550–1750 • Amanda Flather 2. Spinsters with Land in Early Modern England: Inheritance, Possession and Use • Judith Spicksley 3. Becoming Anne Clifford • Jessica L. Malay 4. The Heiress Reconsidered: Contexts for Understanding the Abduction of Arabella Alleyn • Amanda L. Capern 5. From Magnificent Houses to Disagreeable Country: Lady Sophia Newdigate’s Tour of Southern England and Derbyshire, 1748 • Jon Stobart 6. On Being ‘fully and completely mistress of the whole business’: Gender, Land and Estate Accounting in Georgian England • Briony McDonagh 7. Negotiating Men: Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Capability’ Brown and the Construction of Pastoral • Stephen Bending 8. Women’s Involvement in Property in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries • Joan K. F. Heggie 9. Invisible Women: Small-scale Landed Proprietors in Nineteenth-century England • Janet Casson 10. More than Just a Caretaker: Women’s Role in the Intergenerational Transfer of Real and Personal Property in Nineteenth-century Urban England, 1840–1900 • Jennifer Aston Afterword • Amy Louise Erickson Select Bibliography Index