Families in the Expansion of Europe,1500-1800 by Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva

Author:Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva [Silva, Maria Beatriz Nizza da]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351937184
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Silvia Bravo Sandoval and I read the complete notarial files for six notaries who had active practices in Mexico City in the years between 1775 and 1811, and we found few actual dowries in these files. The dowries rarely contained the arras, the common promised financial contribution of the groom in earlier centuries. The few dowries found were all large, as the practice of endowing women from less affluent families disappeared.

For the earlier part of the nineteenth century an index of notarial documents indicates that for 1829, out of a total of 2,732 separate cases in the files of 38 notaries practicing in Mexico City, only 28 dowry documents were listed (Potash, et al., 1982).14 In the 1847 index, the dowry seems to have almost disappeared (Potash, et al., 1983). The practice of formally granting a dowry to a bride at the time of her marriage declined during the course of the eighteenth century. There was no new legislation which could help to account for this change and published sources are silent on the reasons that made families decide to stop issuing these documents.

14 We do not know if these were issued at the time of the marriage, or if they resulted from families attempting to take advantage of the special protections of the dowry in order to prevent their property from possible seizure for debt.

Two economic reasons might be adduced for this change. Since a large part of the value of dowries tended to be movable property, such as jewelry, clothing, household effects, and cash, the relative loss of value of these commodities might help to account for one aspect of this decline. As textiles, silver, and gems became more available during the eighteenth century, the importance of counting the value of these commodities and putting this value into a legal document might have diminished.

A second economic impetus for the decline and disappearance of the dowry has been suggested by Muriel Nazzari (1984) in a summary of a massive research project on the dowry in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In Brazil the dowry was intended to provide for the establishment of a young couple in a society where alternative means for the support of a new household were lacking. At roughly the same time as the practice of dowry granting declined in the Mexican cities studied by Asunción Lavrin and myself, Nazzari observes that the amount of money families wished to place in dowries declined as a percentage of their total estate. Observing the economic changes in the city of São Paulo, Nazzari suggests that the new positions open to young men in the bureaucracy and the professions diminished their need for a father-in-law to provide the means to support them.

Mexican materials fail to support the hypothesis that an expanding bureaucracy and the growth of professions brought about a change in family patterns. Moreover, the data from Mexico also indicate that often very well-to-do men received dowries, and that these frequently played little role in the establishment of a family livelihood.

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