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CUI BONO? THE 1870 BRITISH MARRIED WOMEN'S PROPERTY ACT, BARGAINING POWER, AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF RESOURCES WITHIN MARRIAGE

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13545700500508262

1466-4372

Mary Beth Combs,

Family Dynamics and Relationships

Abstract The 1870 Married Women's Property Act created major change in nineteenth-century British property law. Until the passage of the Act, a husband had legal ownership over his wife's personal property and managerial rights over her real property. The Act granted British women the right to own and control personal property and therefore serves as a natural experiment to test the impact of a legislative change on the distribution of household resources. The article examines whether the Act enabled women to gain a larger share of household resources and alter the distribution of resources within the household. The results indicate that the rights granted to women by the Act dramatically increased the bargaining power and property of wives: wives married after the Act owned a larger share of total household property and invested less of their own income and more of their husband's in forms of property they owned and controlled. Keywords: Economics of the familyBritish women's property rightsbargaining powerintrahousehold resource distribution JEL Codes: N13, D13, K11 Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Earhart Foundation, the University of Iowa scholarship in memory of Jane Weiss, and a Fordham University faculty summer research grant. I have benefited from the comments made by Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Carmen Diana Deere, Cheryl Doss, Rick Geddes, Lynn Hollen-Lees, Beth Ingram, Linda Kerber, Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bart Moore, George Neumann, Robert Pollak, Elyce Rotella, Gene Savin, Troy Tassier, and Chuck Whiteman, as well as the comments of participants at: the 2000 Graduate Economic History Seminar at Nuffield College, Oxford University; the 2002 Social Science History Association Meetings; the 2004 Yale University Workshop on Women and the Distribution of Wealth; the ASGE/IAFFE session on Women and Wealth at the 2005 ASSA Meetings; and four anonymous referees. The usual caveat applies. Notes 1 Scholars who have contributed to the debate include: Leonore Davidoff (Citation1973, Citation1990/6); Lee Holcombe (Citation1973, Citation1983); Patricia Branca (Citation1975); Norma Basch (Citation1982); Marylynn Salmon (Citation1982, Citation1986); Leonore Davidoff and Belinda Westover (Citation1986); Linda Kerber (Citation1980/1986,,Citation1997,(Citation1998); Mary Lyndon Shanley (Citation1989); Susan Staves (Citation1990); Amy Louise Erikson (Citation1993); Jane Lewis (Citation1984/1993); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (Citation1994); Carole Shammas (Citation1994); Reva B. Siegel (Citation1994); Robert J. Morris (Citation1994); Gillian Hamilton (Citation1999); Kris Inwood and Sue Ingram (Citation2000); Richard Geddes and Dean Lueck (Citation2002). 2 See, e.g., Lawrence Stone (Citation1977, Citation1992, Citation1993, Citation1995); Randolph Trumbach (Citation1978). I owe a thank-you to an anonymous referee who encouraged me to make these points. 3 See Basch (Citation1982); Holcombe (Citation1983); Shanley (Citation1989); Ben Griffin (Citation2003). In addition to her arguments about the importance of the feminist movement to the passage of the Act, Basch (Citation1982) also highlights the role of parliamentarians in the passage of the Act. 4 Since the early modern period, the court of equity enabled wealthy parents a means to circumvent the common law: trusts and separate estates. These generally were created for daughters at the time of marriage as a part of a marriage settlement, or at the time of the death of a parent, whereby men left property in trust for daughters and wives. In equity, any trust created for a married woman (e.g., by her father) that settled on her any form of property was acceptable. Any sane person of legal age could settle the trust (Holcombe Citation1983: 39; also see Basch Citation1982; Shanley Citation1989: 46; Morris Citation1994: 176; Shammas Citation1994; Geddes and Lueck 2002). 5 I have argued (Mary Beth Combs Citation2003) that the husband and wife who saw even a small probability of bankruptcy found one saving chance to avoid destitution: the married woman's separate estate. A married man could hide property before declaring bankruptcy by setting aside property for his wife in trust “for her sole use and benefit.” Increasingly in the nineteenth century, creditors found it difficult to collect debts from a middle class resorting to such trusts. The 1870 Act made wives equally liable as husbands for familial debt. It has thus been argued that Parliament sought in the British Married Women's Property Act to reduce debt default and enforce the responsibilities of property owners (see Morris Citation1994; Combs Citation2003). 6 Roderick Floud (Citation1994: 12) asserts that it is unlikely that the Act affected “the reality of working class lives; there the decreasing opportunities for employment for married women, combined with a birth rate which remained high until the end of the century, produced both economic dependence of women upon men and often its corollary in terms of suffering and sacrifice.” 7 In their studies of the social, political, and economic motivations behind the passage of the Act, both Shanley (Citation1989) and Morris (Citation1994) acknowledge the different implications of the law for upper-middle-class women's property. They doubt that the economic lives of upper-middle-class women were greatly impacted by the Act. The property of upper-middle-class women had long been protected by marriage settlements and trusts created on their behalf – a practice modeled on the aristocracy. 8 There are other scholars who call attention to the dangers and difficulties of identifying and studying the “middle class,” or any sub-group of the middle class such as shopkeepers. For studies of nineteenth-century income distribution and the middle class, see Patrick Colquhoun (Citation1806); R. Dudley Baxter (Citation1862); Branca (Citation1975); Robert J. Morris (Citation1976, Citation1979, Citation1980); Peter Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Citation1983); Jeffrey Williamson (Citation1985); Henry Horwitz (Citation1987); Peter Earle (Citation1989). 9 It should be noted that in 1882, an amended version of the 1870 Act – the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 – was passed. The Act of 1882 gave women married after January 1, 1883 the right to own and control all property, including both real property that they possessed or were entitled to at the time of marriage and acquired or entitled property that they received after marriage. It was the Act of 1882 that gave married women the same property rights as single women. The women in the sample studied here, who died between 1901 and 1903, married before 1883. 10 The inheritance tax registers, or Death Duty and Succession Duty Registers, run from 1796 to 1903 and consist of handwritten manuscript entries in volumes covering all duties levied on a deceased person's estate (unfortunately the post-1903 registers do not survive). The registers cover all estates worth over £20 from 1796 to 1881, and subsequently all those over £100, whether or not a will was written. They are written by Inland Revenue officers using a set of abbreviations and usually provide information on occupation, address, spouse's name, children's names, and number of children. They are the only source from which it is possible to deduce net values of personal estates for most of the nineteenth century. From 1853, when succession duty was introduced, they included a valuation, previously unobtainable, of all land, settled or unsettled. 11 Barbara English (Citation1984, Citation1987) and Michael Collinge (Citation1987) discuss in detail the advantages and drawbacks of using the death duty registers to study financial affairs. English and Collinge agree that in most cases the death duty registers are a more comprehensive source than the probate records. 12 There are no indexes to the registers. The sample was gathered by consulting each individual entry in the registers containing last names beginning with C or D and searching for shopkeepers. 13 Finding a shopkeeper in the register does not guarantee that the person will be found easily in the census. People moved. Without the address, finding a person who moved – even if she moved to a house on the next street – involves scrolling through hundreds of feet of microfilm. Fortunately, the Family Record Centre recently compiled an alphabetical index to the 1891 census, which simplified the census linking procedure. Yet with common names like Elizabeth Cooke and Emma Dickinson, linking names – even with the use of the index – required verifying that I had the correct Emma Dickinson. To verify names, I used the index to check that the spouse and children listed in the death duty register matched those listed in the census return. 14 The sample I used (Mary Beth Combs Citation2005) consists of 214 observations, and the summary statistics for the property values are: Pre-1870 cohort: Average real property, 958; Standard Deviation, 490; Average personal property, 762, Standard Deviation 511; Post-1870 Cohort: Average real property, 435; Standard Deviation, 428; Average personal property, 1299, Standard Deviation 684. Pooled-variances t-tests for each set of means in this and the wealth-holding study give test-statistics below 1.0 and strongly suggest, at a 95 percent confidence level, that the sample means used in this study are the same as the sample means from the 214 observations used in the wealth-holding study. 15 E.g., in a typically middle-class London borough such as Islington, the numbers of men and women between the ages of 25 and 35 (either unmarried or widowed) were 7,372 and 8,932. The male/female marriageable age ratio for the group was 0.88. The unmarried women in the cohort between the ages of 35 and 45 faced a more difficult marriage market – the number of unmarried and widowed men totaled 2,753, while the number of unmarried and widowed women totaled 5,312 to make a male/female marriageable age ratio of 0.54 (Census of Citation1891). 16 Such was the case for a Mrs Weedon, who in 1843 was deserted by her husband (Rudge v. Weedon, 26 May 1859, English Law Reports, 45, 84, Lord Chancellor and Court of Appeal in Chancery). In 1859, Mrs Weedon was involved in a Chancery suit over her inheritance. She inherited a sum of money from her father and her husband returned to claim the inheritance – which, under common law, was considered to be the property of the husband. The wife, however, testified in court that her husband had deserted her on January 31, 1843 – 16 years earlier – and that she had been living nearby with her mother and father since that date. Mrs Weedon claimed that the property lawfully was hers since she even had gone so far as to obtain a protection order for her property under 20 and 21 Vict. C. 85, s. 21, on the ground of causeless desertion. The example of Sarah Elcock (Public Record Office, Death Duty, Succession Duty, and Estate Duty Registers: Sarah Elcock IR26/8247/932; Edward Elcock IR26/3497/1179; Census Link to 1891 Census for Sarah and Edward Elcock, RG 11/2894/47) also supports the plausibility of using distance from birthplace as a proxy for distance from parents or other close relatives. In 1883, Sarah's husband Edward died, leaving her with four children, all under twelve years of age. Sarah was 39 years old. Soon after Edward's death, Sarah moved back to the town in which she was born – a place where she undoubtedly had a support network of family and friends to help her. Elcock, Weedon, and married women like them who lived close to family had an additional support network and therefore greater bargaining power than women who lived far from family. 17 Public Record Office Residuary Accounts, Class IR19, Boxes 19-226. 18 It is possible to see that there are two outliers (at household property values equal to £14,758 and £16,250) in the first plot that depicts “Households where the Couple Married Before 1870.” While I found that the results from the estimation are slightly sensitive to the outliers, the results did not change substantially. However, since it was highly unusual for a family in the lower middle class to have such high household property, the outliers are not representative of the group being studied; therefore, I dropped the two outliers in the estimation. 19 Public Record Office, Clerks of Records and Writs Office, Pleadings: Class C16. The variable measuring the number of court cases where married women sued for control of their property was obtained from a study of over 10,000 Chancery Court cases. The variable measuring local employment opportunities for middle-class women was obtained from census returns from typically middle-class boroughs in English and Welsh cities. From census information, I calculated the ratio of the number of middle-class women in each borough to the number of typically middle-class women's occupations available in the borough. 20 A woman married before 1870 who wished to sue in the equity had to appear with someone who was referred to as a “next friend.” A next friend usually was a man – her father or brother – but also could be any single or widowed woman – a sister, mother, other relative, or friend – who maintained the legal identity of feme sole. Source: Public Record Office, Court of Chancery: Clerks of Records and Writs Office, Pleadings: Class C16 Boxes 1-36 (A-M), 1861; Class C16 Boxes 543-576 (A-M), 1869; Class C16 Boxes 691-726 (A-M), 1871; Class J54 Boxes 151-170 (A-M), 1880; Class J54 Boxes 626-663 (A-M), 1890; Class J54 Boxes 1051-1101 (A-M), 1900. 21 The bargaining environment of the household discussed here is inspired by the work of Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown (Citation1980); Marjorie McElroy and Mary Jean Horney (Citation1981, 1990); Robert Pollak (Citation1985, Citation1994); Marjorie McElroy (Citation1990); Shelley Lundberg and Robert Pollak (Citation1993, Citation1994, Citation1996); Shelley Lundberg, Robert Pollak, and Terrence Wales (Citation1996); Michael Carter and Elizabeth Katz (Citation1997); Zhiqi Q. Chen and Frances Wooley (Citation2001). Additional studies that give insight into the collective nature of household decision making and multi-utility frameworks include: Pierre-Andre Chiappori (Citation1988, Citation1991); Irene Dankleman and Joan Davidson's (Citation1988) study of a project encouraging soybean production in Togo; David Ulph (Citation1988); Joachim Von Braun and Patrick J. R. Webb's (Citation1989) study of initiatives to introduce rice irrigation in Gambia; Duncan Thomas (Citation1990, Citation1997); Ravi Kanbur (Citation1991); Michael Carter and Elizabeth G. Katz (Citation1992). In addition, Nancy Folbre's work on class-conflict models (Citation1986) and gender coalitions (Citation1997) also provides an alternative to the common preference model (Folbre Citation1986, Citation1997). 22 Divorce became legal in England in 1857. For most couples, however, the £300 cost of an uncontested divorce was out of economic reach (average annual rent at the time was £25). Most simply separated from or deserted their spouses. Members of the group studied here likely were aware that separation and desertion were available options. While an alternative framework might be to consider the threat point to be one that is internal to the marriage (Lundberg and Pollak Citation1993), the model discussed here simply acknowledges that separation and desertion were available options and were more likely to be used by members of the lower middle class than divorce. 23 E.g., in Middlesex, the women working in the following occupations were as follows: 1,146 fancy goods dealers; 15,991 tailors; 51,258 milliners; 3,169 paper box makers; 7,765 teachers; and so on. I counted the total number of women engaged in each of the main employment options for women of this group. In addition, one may object to this proxy if labor supplies are exogenously given; however, we must remember that a woman in the shop-keeping class who was in need of cash could take in piecework work as a governess, and, as a last resort, work as a servant. Women in this group often did just these things, especially if they had been deserted by their husbands. Husbands, as a last resort, always could find work as laborers if the shop failed. 24 As the dependent variable is the share of household wealth owned by the wife, it may be argued that the appropriate model is the limited dependent variable model; however, not all such variables need special treatment. For example, a strictly positive variable that takes on many different values rarely needs a special econometric model (the values of the dependent variable used here are strictly positive and take on values between 0 and 100). Moreover, since binary dependent variables tend to have a distribution of residual errors that is heteroscedastic, I tested the data for evidence of such an error. The p-value for the White's test for heteroscedasticity is 0.43 and the p-value for the Breusch-Pagan test for heteroscedasticity is 0.31. Therefore, at any reasonable level of significance, I cannot reject the null hypothesis of homoscedasticity. It seems that in this case the LPM model does not exhibit the usual problems of heteroscedasticity that typically are observed when we use it to estimate a model with limited dependent variable data. 25 As an additional test concerning the effect of the Act, I ask whether the two sets of data for the pre- and post-1870 marriages contain substantially different regression coefficients for the same theoretical equation used above but not including the Act variable. If there is no change in the coefficients in each of the two groups, one can infer that something else (other than household demographics) caused the change in the observed share value – the Married Women's Property Act. Answering the question requires the straightforward application of the Chow test (Gregory C. Chow Citation1960). A test of the null hypothesis that the slope coefficients are the same in two samples, before and after the passage of the Act, indicates that the two sets of regression coefficients are equivalent. Since the calculated F-statistic, 0.4523, is less than the critical F-value [9, 44] (2.84), I conclude that the two sets of regression coefficients are equivalent. The results suggest that the Act had an exogenous effect on the share of household property owned by wives; the Act did not cause a change in the relationship between household structure variables and the share of household property. 26 The standard error is 0.27, and a 95 percent confidence interval was used. 27 The standard errors of the Act and distance variables in the third form of the estimation are are 0.27 and 0.003, and a 95 percent confidence interval was used. 28 Even though women married before 1870 did not have the common law right to own and control personal property, this does not mean women did not hold wealth in the form of personal property. Wives held personal property under three common circumstances. First, wives held forms of personal property that were considered necessaries and, as noted above, that also fell under the sub-category paraphernalia. A husband had a legal obligation to provide his wife with necessaries that at the very least met subsistence level needs, such as basic clothing. Second, a wife might have access, through trustees, to personal property that had been set aside for her in trust at the time of her marriage by any sane person of legal age, such as her parents or husband. Third, a wife might choose to hold personal property with the knowledge that the property legally could be misused by the husband. If a wife took this kind of wealth-holding risk and the marriage turned sour, the wife had little legal recourse if the husband disposed of any of the wife's personal property. 29 The test of whether the two sample proportions are the same is rejected at a 99 percent confidence interval; there is a difference in the sample populations. For a study of the wealth-holding trends of 1,238 British women over the years 1860 to 1903, and a detailed discussion of the determinants and implications of the shift in wealth-holding from real to personal property, see Combs (Citation2005). For a study of the wealth-holding patterns in the United States, see Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin (Citation1987) or Shammas (Citation1994). 30 One might question whether it is necessary to calculate the variance of the investment portfolio over the sample group. The point is an important one when dealing with highly sophisticated, internationally focused, large-scale investors. The investment portfolios of the group, however, were not diverse: the investment decision for members of this group mainly concerned a choice between consols or a cottage. 31 Martin J. Daunton (Citation1990/1996: 224) argues that “investment in housing was more than a search for profits and rents … the wealthier families might invest predominantly in stocks and shares, whereas the less wealthy would concentrate upon local, secure and tangible assets. … The less wealthy members of the middle class were particularly attracted to investment in housing. Usually their businesses had been small scale and precarious with an intense localism of concern, and this goes far to explain the characteristic investment of surpluses in highly secure and local outlets, especially urban property. The owners of house property, it was reported in 1834, were generally retired tradesman, widows and persons of small property, and this remained the case until 1914.” 32 In Victorian England, the term “suitable” goods for the consumption of a particular class or station was a matter of much debate within groups and between groups. A woman could go to court to demand her proper maintenance; however, the court was at liberty to decide what exactly constituted “proper maintenance.” The sums varied by judge and by the judge's decision about socio-economic class of the claimant. 33 In the nineteenth century, there were 12 pence in every shilling and 20 shillings in every pound; therefore there were 240 pence in a pound. Thanks to an anonymous referee for calling this to my attention.