Men, Women and Property in England, 1780-1870

THIS book is sub-titled A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes, and chiefly concerns the period c.1820–1850. It is thus considerably more specialised than its title or dustjacket convey, and closely linked to its author's previous publications. Its text, however, often reads like a first draft that had to be hurried into print without revision by author, editor or proof-reader. The result is a curate's egg. One of its best parts will be found on pages 367–83: they provide a clear and concise summary of the book's argument. Middle-class consciousness, we learn, was above all a product of anxiety bred by demographic, economic and social insecurity. Until the 1860s or even later, the only effective risk-spreading agency was the family network, and wills reveal the strategies used to bring this into play. In 1830–34, 267 wills were brought for probate from the parish of Leeds. These wills provide the book's bed-rock, and show again how much can be learnt from such documents, especially when (as here) they are construed with the aid of intimate knowledge of the people, property and places concerned, their past and their future. These Leeds will-makers strove for equity—share and share alike between wife and children, or, failing them, between the extended family. There was no privileging of males, still less of eldest sons, and females were usually treated with ‘gendered equality’, that is, provided with an income through a trust. (The strategic role of these trusts is well brought out.) Personal gifts made during life were brought into hotchpot; charitable bequests were rare, as were arrangements for business continuity unless provision was being made for minor children or a widow. Inheritance practices like these ‘ensured the reproduction of an active profit-seeking middle class’ (p. 372), and fostered male-led family networks that both supported widows and spinsters, and were importantly supported by them. Such networks could be geographically far-flung, and suggest a provincial-metropolitan rather than a north–south divide

Agency (philosophy · Argument (complex analysis · Genealogy · Political science · Probate · Property (philosophy · Social science · Sociology · Wife · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Medicine

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