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Wed 24 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

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Thursday 25 March 2021 16.00 - 17.15
N-8 FAM26 Women and Family Property
N
Networks: Family and Demography , Women and Gender Chair: Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux
Organizer: Beatrice Moring Discussant: Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux
Lloyd Bonfield : What the Legacy Duty (1796) can Tell Historians about Collateral Female Inheritance?
In 1797 Parliament enacted the Legacy Duty, Britain's first capital transfer tax at death. Only personal property was subjected to tax; land was exempt. In its initial iteration the levy was payable only on collateral inheritances and where the deceased had no surviving spouse. The returns provide a wealth of ... (Show more)
In 1797 Parliament enacted the Legacy Duty, Britain's first capital transfer tax at death. Only personal property was subjected to tax; land was exempt. In its initial iteration the levy was payable only on collateral inheritances and where the deceased had no surviving spouse. The returns provide a wealth of information about who a property owner without spouse or kin selected as legatees. The paper will focus on the parliamentary debate and tabulate the percentage of wealth that passed to female legatees. (Show less)

Luminita Dumanescu, Ioan Bolovan : From Birth to Grave, I am my Father’s Daughter!
In the common perception, the surname of a woman is a changing value of her personality as, at least in theory and customarily, she will take her husband name at marriage. For a traditional and patriarchal society like the Romanian one in the second half of the 19th Century, ... (Show more)
In the common perception, the surname of a woman is a changing value of her personality as, at least in theory and customarily, she will take her husband name at marriage. For a traditional and patriarchal society like the Romanian one in the second half of the 19th Century, the common, empirical knowledge and the ancestral believes alike tempted one to argue that the woman left behind her maiden name and, from the day of her marriage till the end of her life (presumably lived with the same man), she assumed his family name and a new combined identity. When the information gathered in the Historical Population database of Transylvania was quantitatively important enough to allow some preliminary conclusions on this segment of population, it became evident, even at a first sight, that we have a wrong perception about the wife’s name after marriage: more than half of the married women were registered in different moments of their lives, in different circumstances, with their maiden name.
Three life events allowed us to reconstruct the evolution of name in the case of a woman: at marriage, when they gave birth and at death. Moreover, many of these women acted as godmothers and this fourth life event which involved married women helped the researcher control the results.
A preliminary research on 24.000 events of baptism performed for the Greek-Catholic and Orthodox denominations in Transylvania revealed that in 16.484 of the cases when the names and surnames of the parents were completed, the name of the mother is different form the name of the father, which means that she is further recognized in the community with her maiden name. When we searched the recurrence of the maiden name for married women at their deaths we found that for 3455 death cases when the priest wrote the name of the spouse next to the deceased, in 80% they were also registered with their maiden name. The preliminary results entitle us to consider that a marriage contract is not automatically followed by a name change and the married woman is recognized by her own name in the subsequent papers. The Civil Code of 1853 states that the wife will take the name of the husband at marriage and, in this respect, our preliminary findings contradict the norm and raise specific research questions: what are the reasons for which the women preserve their maiden name in such a great extent, despite of legislation? Is this a personal choice related to the personal identity (Gorence 1976, Snyder and Fromkin, 1980) or a customary practice of the communities maintained with the only purpose of preserving the link between families, probably for issues concerning the property transmission and the lineage?

References
Patricia J. Gorence, Women’s Name Rights in Marquette Law Review, 59 (4), 1976, pp. 875-899.
C. R. Sneider, Howard L. Fromkin, Uniqueness. The Human Pursuit of Difference, New York & London, Plenum Press, 1980.
(Show less)

Margareth Lanzinger : Widows and Relatives: Competing Property Interests (Tirol 1600-1800)
In early modern and modern European societies, a major share of property was transferred via inheritance and/or via marriage. The interplay of marriage and inheritance featured major differences in regulation and practice across Europe due to the considerable legal plurality that existed – not only on the regional level, but ... (Show more)
In early modern and modern European societies, a major share of property was transferred via inheritance and/or via marriage. The interplay of marriage and inheritance featured major differences in regulation and practice across Europe due to the considerable legal plurality that existed – not only on the regional level, but also depending on social status and, especially, on the prevailing marital property regime. Separation of marital property – In contrast to joint marital property – secured descendants and relatives an advantage over spouses in terms of entitlements to ownership: it was a situation in which marital and inheritance transfers were basically in competition with each other. Who had priority was a matter of constant debate: Was it the spouse or the descendants? If the couple was childless, were the relatives of the deceased next in line as heirs? And to what kind of provisions was the widow entitled? The paper aims to examine these competing interests with reference to the situation in Tirol from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. (Show less)

Beatrice Moring : Women, Law and Property Transmission in the Nordic Countries
In the Kingdom of Sweden (which included Finland from 1190s to 1809), two national law codes were introduced in the 1350s, King Magnus Eriksson’s Law of the Realm, for the countryside and King Magnus Eriksson’s Law for Towns, regulating urban areas. The main principles of these laws were retained through ... (Show more)
In the Kingdom of Sweden (which included Finland from 1190s to 1809), two national law codes were introduced in the 1350s, King Magnus Eriksson’s Law of the Realm, for the countryside and King Magnus Eriksson’s Law for Towns, regulating urban areas. The main principles of these laws were retained through later codifications until the 19th century. In rural areas land was the most important property and family rights were transferred vertically through the generations. Women as well as men could inherit family land and property. Marriage, however, only gave the parties rights to the movables not land. Urban areas were subject to different rules. As urban property did not include family land, widows inherited half the property in addition to their morning gift. During marriage the parties were in theory co-owners of the property. Unlike in the rural system where female shares were smaller than those of males, daughters in a town had equal inheritance rights with sons.
While the widow of a town burgher could inherit a part or even all of his property, engaging in active pursuit of a regulated craft could pose some problems unless she was able to engage a person with suitable credential for the formal supervision, on the other hand, no restrictions were put on a widow in trade. In the 1700s 10-15 percent of the trading burghers in Nordic towns were widows. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of women in the process of transmission of family property in 18th century Finland and Sweden. To exemplify the situation, property transfers in the town of Borga in southern Finland and in Stockholm will be analyzed. The study will document the presence of females in transfer documents and in registration of property ownership or property control. (Show less)

Robert Sweeny : The State of Things. Towards a Feminist Critique of Legal Reception in European Colonies of Settlement
The default assumption in the Americas is that when a particular European country’s law was “received” into the colony marks not only the starting point for its legal history, but that the coherence and logic of the invading power’s legal system henceforth prevailed. Europeans established two qualitatively differing types of ... (Show more)
The default assumption in the Americas is that when a particular European country’s law was “received” into the colony marks not only the starting point for its legal history, but that the coherence and logic of the invading power’s legal system henceforth prevailed. Europeans established two qualitatively differing types of colonies in the Americas, colonies of settlement and slave colonies. Neither were particularly amenable to the simple application of a European power’s legal system, for each posed unique challenges not foreseen in Europe. This paper examines the evolution of the legal systems within the colonies of settlement established in North-eastern North America by the European invaders in the 17th century. It does so from a feminist perspective on the key socio-economic unit in those societies: the independent, commodity-producing, household. I argue that the role of the state in these colonies of settlement was different than in early modern Europe. Here its primary task was to ensure the stable reproduction and expansion of productive, familial-based, households. It achieved this aim through a variety of means, but among the most important were the control of the exchange of goods, the defining of rights created through marriage and how both rights and goods passed on through inheritance. These were highly gendered processes sensitive to local conditions. As a result, the “received” legal system never operated with either the coherence or logic it was presumed to have in Europe. It was changed, often quite fundamentally, to meet the specific challenges in each colony and co-existed with indigenous legal systems, while often encompassing diverse European traditions of former imperial powers. (Show less)

Raquel Tovar Pulido : The Transmission of the Inheritance by Women in Spain in the Old Regime
The investigations about the attitudes that the Spanish people had before the death during the Old Regime have revealed interesting data of the behavior of women and men in the death bed. The dimension of these studies has spread to various territories of the Iberian Peninsula, which allows us to ... (Show more)
The investigations about the attitudes that the Spanish people had before the death during the Old Regime have revealed interesting data of the behavior of women and men in the death bed. The dimension of these studies has spread to various territories of the Iberian Peninsula, which allows us to compare results and obtain a broad perspective of the subject (J. Casey; M. García Fernández).
European historiography has been concerned with the studies on widowed women in Ancient Regime since the last decades of the twentieth century. The role of women in families, among other authors, is studied by A. Fauve-Chamoux, O. Hufton, J. Boulton and M. Palazzi on France, the United Kingdom and Italy. In the twenty-first century, the studies about women also continued to expand, including the interesting monograph by R. Wall (ed.), “Widows in European Society”, The History of the Family, (2002), vol. 7, issue 1; which encompasses the family and work dynamics of these women in the Mediterranean (M. A. Gomila Grau), in Central Europe (J. Brown), in Britain (R. Wall) and in Northern Europe (B. Moring) etc. Also the history of widows in the family has been studied in the Spanish Iberian Peninsula: some authors investigated the northwest –Galicia (S. Rial García and O. Rey Castelao)–, the interior peninsular –León (M. J. Pérez Álvarez) and Castilla-La Mancha (F. García González)–, and the west –Extremadura (J. P. Blanco Carrasco, M. A. Hernández Bermejo and M. Santillana Pérez)–.
This proposal studies the transmission of the feminine property in the south of Spain in the XVIIIth century. As sources for the study have been used notarial protocols preserved in the Provincial Historical Archive of Jaén, with respect to a set of populations of the Kingdom of Jaén. The documentary sources on which this research focuses are the testaments, codicils and powers related to widowed, single and married women.
Methodologically, based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis, it has been studied the system of family transmission of inheritance. On the one hand, the people who are chosen as the heirs, according to the degree of kinship with the family. On the other hand, the typology of the goods that are bequeathed through testamentary mandates. Nearly eighty documents have been analyzed, most of which are testaments, but codicils and powers to test are also included. The structure is always the same: it includes information about where they are to be buried, generally in the main church of the town; and the Masses that are to be prayed for, either in the parish or in nearby convents, as well as alms and pious works that they wished to have done once they had passed away. We observe, therefore, that the profession of faith, the provisions on funerals and the place of burial follow the same scheme within the document, as a preliminary to the dispositive clauses relating to the family and the distribution of property. (Show less)



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