Women and Property: In Early Modern England

`An impressive study.' - Germaine Greer. Amy Erickson combines legal, social and women's history in an imaginative and methodically interesting way to chart the limits and the contradictions of women as property owners. This ground-breaking book reveals the economic reality of ordinary women between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. Drawing on little-known sources, Amy Louise Erickson reconstructs day-to-day lives, showing how women owned, managed and inherited property on a scale previously unrecognised. Her complex and fascinating research, which contrasts the written laws with the actual practice, completely revises the traditional picture of women's economic status in pre-industrial England. Women and Property is essential reading for anyone interested in women, law and the past.