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Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England.

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Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England Edited by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson and and A. R. Buck Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004

This innovative collection of essays on English women and property from the later sixteenth through the eighteenth century looks at historical record and contemporary fiction in order to understand how women responded to two apparently debilitating dispensations: their divinely ordered inferiority to males and their legal incapacity in relation to husbands (or coverture), an incapacity that they also suffered, in a less categorical sense, in relation to other male relatives, fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins. Despite such constraints, these essays show that women in different stations in life worked through ideological and legal limits to gain a virtual independence in many matters involving property. Time and again, women undertook business in behalf of their families and themselves. Ably introduced by a review of current scholarship by the editors, these essays break new ground in the interdisciplinary domains of history, law, and literature.

Readers may find it useful to begin with Margreta de Grazia's afterword, which analyzes coverture in relation to the concept of the individual. The married couple, she argues, is a legally indivisible unit; we refer to the wife as a feme covert but we must see her in tandem with her husband, a baron covert. This complication of the otherwise simple distinction of coverture alerts us not only to marital obligations of the husband but also to the negotiated exchanges that allowed wives and other women to contest distributions of property at law. De Grazia reminds us of Locke's account of the most basic kind of property that can be possessed, and notably only by men: "Every Man has a Property in his Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands, we may say are properly his." (1) Thus, a man could sell his labor for a wage or an item from his workshop for a price. But what by way of property was open to a wife, a widow, or a single woman?

We see the grimmest and most restrictive situations in accounts of inheritance. Mary Murray's essay on primogeniture acknowledges that from 1300 "patrilinear inheritance practices displaced women's common law rights to land, not only daughters' rights...

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