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- Title
'His Estate' - or Hers? Three Chapters in the History of Married Women's Property Rights in Sweden, 1350-1850.
- Authors
Ågren, Maria
- Abstract
Based on the monograph Domestic Secrets: Women and Property in Sweden, 1600 to 1857 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), this article analyses Swedish women’s property rights over a period of 500 years. The specific focus is on married women in rural areas and the ways in which their property rights were protected. The article charts a development from a medieval system, providing married women within the landholding part of the population with comparatively robust property rights, through a phase when these property rights were undermined (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), to a new system, which made women’s and men’s property rights more equal and paid more attention to the needs of non-landholding families. It is argued that these emancipatory reforms of the nineteenth century cannot be explained without the long prehistory of the complicated relationship between women and property and between individual women’s economic problems and the construction of ‘women’ as a social and legal category.
- Subjects
SWEDEN; PROPERTY rights -- History; DOMESTIC Secrets: Women &; Property in Sweden 1600-1857 (Book); WOMEN; HISTORY of the legal status of married women; SWEDISH social conditions; MARRIED women; INHERITANCE &; succession; LAW; HISTORY; SOCIAL conditions of women
- Publication
Gender & History, 2013, Vol 25, Issue 2, p211
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1111/1468-0424.12014