Women, marriage and property in wealthy landed families in Ireland, 1750–1850 by Deborah Wilson

Author:Deborah Wilson [Wilson, Deborah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Great Britain, Social Science, Women's Studies, Ireland, General, Europe, Nonfiction, Gender Studies, History, Social & Cultural Studies
ISBN: 9781847797216
Google: B2W5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2013-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

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Single women and property

Legally, both widows and single women were femes soles and had the right to own and control their own property, make contracts, sue and be sued. However, as a history of single women in early modern England has noted, modern historians of women have neglected the fact that ‘although a single woman and a widow were both unmarried women, people in early modern England did not think of these two groups of women in the same way’.1 The term ‘spinster’ carried negative connotations in this period. The age at which a single woman became an ‘old maid’ averaged at thirty-five and, as another history of single women has noted, the ‘shame and scorn with which spinsters were regarded in the past often makes them virtually invisible’.2 It has also been speculated that the labelling of single women as ‘old maids’ was the result of an ideology that encouraged women to ‘yield possession and control of their earthly goods … to men’.3

In Ireland it is clear that the dismal image associated with spinsters in this period was related to their financial situation. The Retrospections of Dorothea Herbert, for example, is the memoir of a spinster from a middle-class rectory family, written when the author was about thirty years old, in the period after the death of her father and indicating her increasing isolation as a spinster who was economically dependent upon her family.4 It is unclear whether wealthy single women in Ireland experienced the shame associated with spinsterhood to the same degree as their poorer contemporaries, although it has been observed that many rich women married to avoid the stigma of spinsterhood.5 It may have been the case that wealthy spinsters were protected from such influences by their economic independence. Single women are absent from family genealogies that focus on marriage and the transmission of land from one generation to the next. However, as daughters, single women can be found in family settlements. The single woman’s experience of property can also be traced through various deeds and property-related documents such as tax receipts, as well as personal correspondence and last wills and testaments. Such documents reveal a more complex life than images of lonely spinsterhood suggest, as single women are revealed as active, independent women who controlled their own property, generated extra income through loans and lived independent lives outside the family estate with connections to wide networks of friends and extended family.

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