Editors

Amanda L. Capern(Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull)

Briony McDonagh (Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull)

Jennifer Aston (Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University)

Publisher

Boydell Press (November 2019)

ISBN

9781783273980

Description

Women and the Land examines English women's legal rights to land and the reality and consequences of their land ownership over four centuries.

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 drivenby 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 wasconcentrated 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 qualitativeand 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

Introduction: Women, Property and Land - Briony McDonagh and Amanda L. Capern and Jennifer Aston

Women, Work and Land: The Spatial Dynamics of Gender Relations in Early Modern England 1550-1750 - Amanda J. Flather

Spinsters with Land in Early Modern England: Inheritance, Possession and Use - Judith Spicksley

Becoming Anne Clifford - Judith L. Malay

The Heiress Reconsidered: Contexts for Understanding the Abduction of Arabella Alleyn - Amanda L. Capern

From Magnificent Houses to Disagreeable Country: Lady Sophia Newdigate's Tour of Southern England and Derbyshire, 1748 - Jon Stobart

On Being 'fully and completely mistress of the whole business': Gender, Land and Estate Accounting in Georgian England - Briony McDonagh

Negotiating Men: Elizabeth Montagu, 'Capability' Brown, and the Construction of Pastoral - Stephen Bending

Women's Involvement in Property in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries - Joan Heggie

Invisible Women: Small-scale Landed Proprietors in Nineteenth Century England - Janet Casson

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 Erickson

Select Bibliography