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Eileen Spring presents a fresh interpretation of the history of inheritance among the English gentry and aristocracy. In a work that recasts both the history of real property law and the history of the family, she finds that one of the principal and determinative features of upper-class real property inheritance was the exclusion of females. This exclusion was accomplished by a series of legal devices designed to nullify the common-law rules of inheritance under which--had they prevailed--40 percent of English land would have been inherited or held by women. Current ideas of family development portray female inheritance as increasing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Spring argues that this is a misperception, resulting from an incomplete consideration of the common-law rules. Female rights actually declined, reaching their nadir in the eighteenth century. Spring shows that there was a centuries-long conflict between male and female heirs, a conflict that has not been adequately recognized until now.
Ruth Perry describes the eighteenth-century transformation of the English family as a function of major social changes. She uses social history, literary analysis and anthropological kinship theory to examine texts by Austen, Richardson, Burney, and many others. This important study will be of interest to social and literary historians.
Unique in being written by feminists, in dealing with equity and trusts as a whole and in being written in the critical tradition, this collection of essays draws together both feminist and critical material.
It is 1969 as Eileen Emerson points her car toward the California border. Eileen, who has always embraced her gift to see things not apparent to others, is used to keeping her abilities a secret. But thanks to a devoted mentor, Eileen is now heading toward a new job and beginning in San Diego. Nothing can stop her from achieving all she desiresor so she thinks. David Hearst has just been discharged after serving in Vietnam. Unfortunately, killing has changed himand left him without much of a conscience at all. Now the caretaker of a multimillion dollar banking industry, his new hardened frame of mind guides him to guard a secret with consequences. Carl Baker is a talented and charming baseba...
This book argues that a unique late marriage pattern, discovered in the 1960s but originating in the Middle Ages, explains the continuing puzzle of why western Europe was the site of changes that, from about 1500, gave rise to the modern world. Contrary to views that credit upheavals from the late eighteenth century were reponsible for ushering in the contemporary global era, it contends that the roots of modern developments themselves are located in an event more than a millennium earlier, when the peasants in northwestern Europe began to marry their daughters almost as late as their sons. The appearance of this late marriage system, with its unstable nuclear household form, will also be shown to have exposed for the first time the common ingredients whose presence has perpetuated beliefs in the importance of gender difference and of a sexual hierarchy favoring males.
Examines the role of women in medieval law and society
Imagining Women's Property in Victorian Fiction reframes how we think about Victorian women's changing economic rights and their representation in nineteenth-century novels. The reform of married women's property law between 1856 and 1882 constituted one of the largest economic transformations England had ever seen, as well as one of its most significant challenges to family traditions. By the end of this period, women who had once lost their common-law property rights to their husbands reclaimed their own assets, regained economic agency, and forever altered the legal and theoretical nature of wedlock by doing so. Yet in literary accounts, reforms were neither as decisive as the law implied...
Volume 124 of the 'Proceedings of the British Academy' contains 19 obituaries of recently deceased Fellows of the British Academy.
The Natural West offers essays reflecting the natural history of the American West as written by one of its most respected environmental historians. Developing a provocative theme, Dan Flores asserts that Western environmental history cannot be explained by examining place, culture, or policy alone, but should be understood within the context of a universal human nature. The Natural West entertains the notion that we all have a biological nature that helps explain some of our attitudes towards the environment. FLores also explains the ways in which various cultures-including the Comanches, New Mexico Hispanos, Mormons, Texans, and Montanans-interact with the environment of the West. Gracefully moving between the personal and the objective, Flores intersperses his writings with literature, scientific theory, and personal reflection. The topics cover a wide range-from historical human nature regarding animals and exploration, to the environmental histories of particular Western bioregions, and finally, to Western restoration as the great environmental theme of the twenty-first century.
British Columbia inherited a legal system that granted married men control over most family property and imposed few obligations on them toward their wives and children. Yet from the 1860s onward, lawmakers throughout the Anglo-American world, including legislators on the Pacific Coast, began to grant women and children new rights. Domestic Reforms deftly analyzes the impact of the legislation, with emphasis on the ambitions of regulated populations, the influence of the judiciary, and the social and fiscal concerns of generations of legislators and bureaucrats.