Women and the Land, 1500-1900

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.AMANDA CAPERN is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull.BRIONY MCDONAGH is Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull.JENNIFER ASTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University.CONTRIBUTORS: Jennifer Aston, Stephen Bending, Amanda L. Capern, Janet Casson, Amy Erickson, Amanda Flather, Joan Heggie, Jessica L. Malay, Briony McDonagh, Judith Spicksley, Jon Stobart, Hannah Worthen

“Timely and well considered [it]brings together a valuable series of essays that review qualitative and quantitative aspects of the relationships between women and real estate.”

[A] rich and useful collection that answers existing questions concerning female engagement with the English landscape as well as raising new ones. -- AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW
JOURNAL OF BRITISH STUDIES
This solid collection of essays successfully attempts to recast our understanding of land ownership in England between the crucial years of 1500 and 1900. . . . The result is a consistent picture of women's central role in property administration through everyday dealings, even within a system that privileged men through practices of primogeniture and coverture. Highly recommended. CHOICE

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