Coverture and capitalism

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 1-16

  Erickson, Amy Louise ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Historical harpsichords; Pleyel; Wanda Landowska

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745854678     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/dbi001     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850, Basingstoke and New York, 1996.
2. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, London, 1987; revised edn 2002.
3. On the multiple births of 'capitalism', see further my introduction to the 1993 edition of Alice Clark's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919), London.
4. J. Milnes Holden, The History of Negotiable Instruments in English Law, London, 1955, p. 1.
5. Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce (Paris, 1979), transl. Sian Reynolds, London, 1983, p. 51.
6. On the early modem development of economics as a field of study, see Michael Roberts, 'Recovering a Lost Inheritance: The Marital Economy and its Absence from the Prehistory of Economics in Britain', in The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain 1400-1900, Maria Ågren and A. L. Erickson, Aldershot, 2005.
7. Examples of outstanding economic histories which nevertheless take marriage or women's role in marriage for granted without analysis include Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain, New Haven CT, 2000
8. and John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650-1950, Oxford, 1994.
9. See further Amy L. Erickson, 'The Marital Economy in Comparative Perspective', in Marital Economy, ed. Ågren and Erickson, and Ariadne Schmidt, 'Overleven na de dood. Weduwen in Leiden in de Gouden Eeuw', Amsterdam PhD thesis, 2001, English summary.
10. As illustrated in Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300-1550, Chicago, 1998.
11. For different interpretations of this process, see Eileen Spring, Law, Land and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300-1800, Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1994,
12. and Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System, pp. 79-85.
13. Brian Ferme, Canon Law in Late Medieval England: A Study of William Lyndwood's Provinciale with particular reference to Testamentary Law, Studia et Textus Historiae Iuris Canonici 8, Pontificia Studiorum Universitas Salesiana, Rome, 1996, pp. 128-31.
14. Erickson, Women and Property, pp.28, 169-71,
15. or Erickson, 'Property and Widowhood in England 1660-1840', in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, Harlow, 1999, pp. 152-4.
16. There is no mention in, for example, Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt and the Estates System,
17. or in Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680-1714, Manchester, 1999. The one published article dealing with one of these statutes looks at the question of whether the statute was enacted because, as some proponents claimed, prominent men were avoiding the freedom of the city because of the obligation to observe reasonable parts. It concludes that they were not, and nor did more men take up the freedom of the city after the abolition of reasonable parts.
18. Henry Horwitz, 'Testamentary Practice, Family Strategies, and the last phases of the Custom of London, 1660-1725', Law and History Review 2: 2, 1984, pp. 223-39.
19. Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections. The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830, Edinburgh, 1998.
20. Hanne Marie Johansen, 'Marriage Trouble, Separation and Divorce in early modem Norway', in Marital Economy, ed. Ågren and Erickson.
21. Julie Hardwick, 'Seeking Separations: Gender, Marriages, and Household Economies in early modern France', French Historical Studies 21: 1, 1998, pp. 157-80.
22. Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice, Oxford, 2001.
23. Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey, Harmondsworth, 1981, p. 125.
24. Weil, Political Passions, chapter 5. New research shows that allegations of economic mismanagement did surface in English divorce proceedings as 'secondary complaints':
25. Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England 1660-1800, Cambridge, 2003.
26. Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England, Cambridge, 1998, chap. 6.
27. Margaret Hunt, 'Wives and Marital "Rights" in the Court of Exchequer in the early eighteenth century', in Londinopolis, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner, Manchester, 2000, p. 123.
28. The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancs 1663-74, ed. William L. Sachse, London, 1938, e.g. p. 14.
29. The Journal of Giles Moore, ed. Ruth Bird, Sussex Record Society Series 68, 1970, p. 184.
30. See further, Erickson, 'Property and Widowhood'.
31. For examples of settlements, see Erickson, Women and Property, pp. 129-39.
32. The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, ed. C. Jackson, Surtees Society Series 62, 1873, esp. p. 246.
33. The Autobiography of William Stout of Lancaster 1665-1752, ed. J. D. Marshall, Manchester, 1967, p. 165.
34. Gough, History of Myddle, p. 161.
35. See also Ellen Weeton's unpublished memoirs discussed in Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter, New Haven, CT, 1998, pp. 77-80.
36. For the detailed inventories made for both wives and husbands, as well as an unusual example of a Swedish will, see Gudrun Andersson, 'Forming the Partnership Socially and Economically: A Swedish local elite, 1650-1770', in Marital Economy, ed. Ågren and Erickson.
37. Ann Ighe, 'Minors, Guardians, and Inheritance in early nineteenth-century Sweden', in Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century, ed. David R. Green and Alastair Owens, Westport, CT and London, 2004.
38. Amy M. Froide, 'Hidden Women: Rediscovering the Singlewomen of early modern England', Local Population Studies 68, spring 2002, pp. 27-41.
39. Craig Muldrew, '"A Mutual Assent of her Mind"? Women, Debt, Litigation and Contract in early modern England', History Workshop Journal 55: 1, spring 2003, p. 49.
40. Danielle van den Heuvel's work on the Dutch Republic shows significant gender differences between trades, which differences themselves varied between cities. 'Women and Trade in the early modern Netherlands', European Social Science History Conference, Berlin, March 2004.
41. For a lovely example from Hexham in Northumberland of a woman who manufactured tobacco while her husband was a tanner, despite her being under coverture and Hexham having no feme sole trader legal status, see Christine Churches, 'Women and Property in early modern England: A case study', Social History 23: 25 1998, pp. 177-8.
42. One example is the brewers of Marjolein van Dekken's ongoing study: 'Women and Beverage Production in the early modern Netherlands', European Social Science History Conference, Berlin, March 2004.
43. William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies, Philadelphia, 1993, p. 37.
44. Jordan, Women and Credit, Part 1.
45. Braudel, Wheels, p. 103.
46. Susan Staves, 'Investments, Votes and "Bribes": Women as Shareholders in the Chartered National Companies', in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith, Cambridge, 1998.
47. Barbara Todd, 'Women's Experience of the Financial Revolution', paper presented at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 18 October 2002.
48. Amy M. Froide, 'The Silent Partners of Britain's Financial Revolution: Singlewomen and their Public Investments', paper presented to the Social Science History Association Conference, Baltimore, November 2003.
49. P. G. M. Dickson estimated that in the period 1719-32, women owned twenty per cent of all stock. A Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688-1756, Aldershot, Gregg, 1967, reprint 1993, p. 367.
50. Braudel, Wheels, p. 75.
51. Muldrew, '"Mutual Assent of her Mind"', p. 57. Stretton's Women Waging Law looks at women in the Court of Requests, which heard disputes other than debt, but ones which usually related to financial matters, and discusses barriers to women's litigation in chap. 9.
52. Jordan, Women and Credit, p. 20, where debt litigation is equated with women's participation in moncylending.
53. Muldrew, '"Mutual Assent of her Mind"', p. 57.
54. Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England, London, 1998, p. 236.
55. For recent work on women as moneylenders, see Judith Spicksley, 'To be or not to be Married: Single Women, Money-lending and the Question of Choice in late Tudor and Stuart England', in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Laurel Amtower, Arizona, 2003.
56. Anna Hansen, 'Familjestrategier rörande egendom i Senmedeltidens Stockholm', MA thesis, Uppsala University, 2000, and personal communication on PhD research.
57. Schmidt, 'Overleven na de dood'.
58. Robert Tittler, 'Money-lending in the West Midlands: The Activities of Joyce Jefferies, 1638-49', Historical Research 1994, pp. 249-63.
59. Tittler, 'Money-lending', p. 261. Judith Spicksley of the University of Hull is now preparing an edition of Jefferies' accounts and tracing her in legal records.
60. Pamela Sharpe, 'Dealing with Love: The Ambiguous Independence of Spinsters in early modern England', Gender and History 11: 2, 1999, pp. 209-32,
61. and 'A Woman's Worth: A case study of Capital Accumulation in early modern England', Parergon 19: 1 2002, pp. 173-84.
62. Jill Liddington, 'Gender, Authority and Mining in an Industrial Landscape: Anne Lister 1791-1840', History Workshop Journal 42, 1996,
63. or her Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority, London, 1998.
64. B. A. Holderness, 'Elizabeth Parkin and her Investments, 1733-66: Aspects of the Sheffield Money Market in the eighteenth century', Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 10: 2, 1973, pp. 81-7.
65. Vol. 2, p. 572,
66. according to Alison Kelly, Mrs Coade's Stone, Self-Publishing Association, Upton-upon-Severn, 1990, p. 49.
67. Kelly, Mrs Coade's Stone. There appears to be a large amount of misinformation on Eleanor Coade, both in print and on the web, where she is frequently referred to by modern manufacturers of artificial stone. The two most important myths about her - that she was a widow and that she inherited the factory - are thoroughly debunked in Kelly's excellent study.
68. Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives, Boston, 1995.
69. Jordan, Women and Credit, pp. 20-2.
70. Kelly, Mrs Coade's Stone, p. 24.