Gender, Inheritance and Women as Testators

Abstract

The transmission of property and assets following a death should be of fundamental interest to sociologists, since it is one of the key mechanisms through which social and economic structures are reproduced over time, in a society based upon private ownership. It is also of particular relevance to sociologists of family life, since inheritance is so closely associated with the idea of passing assets down the generations, from parent to child. Engels recognised this in his influential, if somewhat flawed, discussion of nineteenth-century bourgeois marriage in which he argued that inheritance was a critical driving force in producing different family formations. He also saw the significant gender implications, in arguing that the bourgeois view of the family was dominated by the need to ensure the transmission of property from father to son, leaving married women in a position analogous to prostitutes, needed only because their bodies were necessary to produce sons, but otherwise excluded from the process of inheritance (Engels, 1985 edition, pp. 101–3).

The inheritance project, on which this paper draws, is funded by the ESRC (grant no. 000232035). The research team comprises Janet Finch, Jennifer Mason and Judith Masson as directors, with Lynn Hayes and Lorraine Wallis as research associates. This paper is co-authored by Janet Finch and Lynn Hayes, who would like to acknowledge the assistance of other members of the team in data collection and preparation, and for their helpful comments about earlier drafts of this paper.