Marriage Contracts

In England before 1660, a husband controlled his wife’s property. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the shift from land-based to commercial wealth, marriage began to incorporate certain features of a contract. Historians have traditionally argued that this trend represented a gain for women, one that reflects changing views about briefly have represented for women were undermined by judicial decisions about women’s contractual rights.

Shifting through the tangled details of court cases, Staves demonstrates that, despite surface changes, a rhetoric of equality, and occasional decisions supporting women’s financial power, definitions of men’s and women’s property remained inconsistent—generally to women’s detriment. For example, dower lands (property inherited by wives after their husbands’ deaths) could not be sold, power over decisions on marriage contracts, they tended to fall back on pre-1660 assumptions about property.

Staves’ work on women’s property has general implications for other studies about women in eighteenth-century England. Staves revises her previous claim that separate maintenance allowances proved the weakening of patriarchy; she now finds that an oversimplification. She also challenges the contention by historians Jeanne and Lawrence Stone that in the late eighteenth use of an amount of money specified in the marriage contract) was often lost on remarriage.