1The goal of this volume of essays about women and family property – as it is expressed in the editor’s introduction – is to uncover the economic significance of women in the past that has traditionally been obscured or neglected due to the prejudices of economists and researchers and barriers that exist in the archives. This welcome effort to make visible the invisible ranges widely in terms both of geography and chronology, stretching from Italy to Cape Town and from the medieval period up to 1960, although with a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book’s eight chapters examine a variety of different legal regimes but they share common themes and approaches, such as seeking to compare written laws and accepted customs with the actual experiences of widows, wives and spinsters.

2In an essay entitled “Property ownership and inheritance rights: indicators of French immigrant women’s empowerment process in California, 1880-1940”, Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga reveals the more favourable property rights and opportunities migrant French women enjoyed in California compared with in the Pyrenean mountain communities they came from. In particular, many immigrant wives enjoyed joint tenancy with their husbands, allowing them to inherit estates in full if they became widows. Raquel Tovar Pulido uses wills of women from Andalusia in the eighteenth century to explore their relations with close family and kin, as well as their control and transfer of property. She finds that spinsters, married women and widows all took slightly different approaches to the distribution of their assets at death; widows, for example, choosing their children as universal heirs, or in the absence of children their nephews. But all women’s wills reveal their intrafamilial relationships and their willingness to make modifications to local customs and conventions to compensate specific beneficiaries for their contributions to the family project.

3Beatrice Moring, the volume’s editor, draws upon a broad array of sources to examine women, family and family property in Stockholm in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She demonstrates that while women enjoyed fewer individual rights than their male counterparts, they were regularly integral to family strategies of survival and success, whether on farms or running businesses. In some areas daughters inherited businesses more often than sons, many of them sharing control with their husbands. In these and other ways, married women were not passive appendages to their husbands, but active economic agents. Listings of innkeepers, for example, reveal dozens of married women whose husbands worked in completely different trades and occupations.

4Hilde Sandvik looks at attempts by Norwegian women (and men) in the early nineteenth century to keep the estates of deceased family members whole and undivided, at a time when such decisions lay in the hands of civic authorities. She utilises testimonials attesting that widows were “sensible, economic, frugal, and fully competent” to run their late husbands’ estates and compares the language used to describe their male equivalents. Widows’ applications were overwhelmingly successful, many arguing that dividing an estate would disturb their “trade and livelihood”. The positive attitudes towards granting widows authority over the whole estate were so persistent that when reformers legislated a new regime in 1851, which favoured widowers and discriminated against widows, it lasted only 17 years before being rescinded in Norway (although it lived on in Denmark until 1926).

5The next essay in the volume moves the focus to South Africa, where Amy Rommelspacher examines antenuptial contracts in Cape Town between 1924 and 1961. One aim of her essay is to apply modern economic theories that associate lower age gaps between wives and husbands and the ability to secure rights in marriage settlements with increased female agency. The correlation turns out to be inexact and unreliable, revealing the dangers of attempting to measure independence by applying modern standards of individual autonomy that fit uneasily with earlier conceptions of family autonomy and shared priorities. However, Rommelspacher argues convincingly that privileged white women could increase their autonomy by investing in antenuptial marriage contracts. In her words, they could “buy agency” – something privileged English wives had known for over 400 years – but most non-white women lacked the knowledge and resources to follow suit.

6Beatrice Zucca Micheletto takes a different approach from the other contributors in her essay on “Women and property in pre-unification Italy: a long-term overview of norms and practices”. As the title suggests, rather than focus on a single issue, area or time period, she provides an overview of the key aspects of property ownership and transfer in different geographical regions in Italy from the medieval period to the twentieth century. Using her own research to punctuate and illustrate her survey, she clearly sets out the intricacies of dotal assets such as dowries, intestate succession, testamentary practices and the exclusion of daughters from their fathers’ inheritance, as well as women’s participation in credit networks and employment. Micheletto emphasizes differences in property ownership and distribution by region and over time and brings clarity to complicated subjects in a way that will appeal to graduate students and specialists alike.

7By contrast, Lloyd Bonfield limits himself to a few decades after 1796, mining the extraordinary records resulting from the introduction in Britain of the Legacy Duty, a precursor of the Inheritance Tax. Unlike taxes on the consumption of goods, which were common at the time, this tax on capital at death required the recording in registers of detailed information about the deceased and their property. Bonfield uses them to examine the wealth at the death of a sample of women from Canterbury, Chester, Norwich and Exeter and compares them with a select group of men. Overall, he finds that the mean wealth of spinsters was greater than widows, and that while men as a group were wealthier, the margins were not excessive (averaging 10%). In fact, in Chester, women’s personal wealth exceeded men’s by 27%.

8Paulo Teodoro de Matos and Ana Mafalda Lopes look at inheritance practices in a very specific and anomalous location, the Portuguese island of São Jorge in the Azores archipelago, where geography and climate shaped the productive possibilities of the relatively small population. The rugged terrain and limited farmable land led to significant migration in the nineteenth century, especially by males. The resulting gender imbalance influenced family formation and land control. The prevalence of celibacy (with rates as high as 36% among women in Ribeira Seca at the end of the eighteenth century) contributed to unusually high illegitimacy rates and almost routine inheritance of land by illegitimate children. Another practice that was widespread involved widows keeping children in their homes as they aged, rewarding those who contributed to their care with the inheritance of the family holding.

9Overall, the volume succeeds in its aim of emphasizing the historical economic importance of women, especially widows. However, the neglect the editor and contributors address is not nearly as prevalent today as it was in the final decades of the twentieth century. Huge strides have been made in locating and measuring women’s economic contributions through productive labour and investment, not simply inheritance and marriage. Far from viewing women as inert and insignificant holders or transferers of wealth, dozens of scholars now place them at the centre of economic measures of activity, as investors, business owners and entrepreneurs, central participants in the financial revolution in Britain, and workers in a plethora of trades and occupations. There is no mention here, or engagement with, the large scale “women and work” projects based in Uppsala, looking at Sweden, and in Exeter, looking at Britain. Similarly, it is unfortunate that few of the contributors consider the implications of remarriage and the prevalence of blended families in the pre-modern era. It is telling that while many cite Lyndan Warner and Sandra Cavallo’s Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (1999), none cite Warner and Gabriela Erdélyi’s Stepfamilies in Europe 1400-1800 (2018).

10Given these unfortunate blindspots, the most influential contribution the volume makes may be in showcasing various rich and neglected archival sources. The registers compiled to administer the Legacy Tax that Bonfield draws from, for example, record not only the names, occupations and status of the deceased and the taxes paid, but also information from wills, inventories and accounts of administration. Bonfield argues that this material can be used to correlate wealth with occupation or status and to identify and map social and family networks. To take just one other example, Rommelspacher’s database contains an astonishing 30,000 transcribed Anglican marriage records. Finally, the volume suffers from inconsistent editing and some minor slips. A whole paragraph is repeated (pp. 195, 198); some essays use the language of gender, while others use the language of sex; Amy Erickson’s name is spelt incorrectly; coverture in England was not “common law legislation” (p. 18) and so on. Despite these stumbles, the volume is packed full of interesting material and discussions of women’s interactions with property through inheritance, marriage and their productive labour and will be of interest to specialists and students in all of these fields.