Coverture and Capitalism

Abstract

Discussions of gender and capitalism have focused on the period after 1750, and so generally on the process of industrialization. The relationship is usually thought of in terms of capitalism's (or industrialization's) effect on gender relationships. We are familiar with analyses of the ways in which a growing cash economy and industrialization exacerbated the separation of the spheres of home and production, excluding women from the wage economy, and the ways in which women's unpaid work props up and makes possible the wage economy. The title of Pamela Sharpe's book, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850,l is a good summary of how we tend to think of gender in relation to capitalist changes. Other studies have explored changing perceptions of work over the early modern period, and changes in the work that women and men actually did, and the values ascribed to that work. The role of gender in capital investment and capital formation in the advanced industrial capitalism of England has been examined in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 2 What happens if we focus instead on an earlier period, on the two centuries leading up to the 'financial revolution' of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? What happens if we turn the 'gender and capi talism' question around, to look at the role of gender in the creation of a widespread capitalist economy in the first place? Capitalism here means not industrialization and the wage economy, but the free flow of capital as demonstrated by investment and complex financial instruments. Gender in this aspect of capitalism is evident not in work patterns, but in property law.3 I would like to suggest here that the reason that England developed an extensive capitalist economy earlier than elsewhere in Europe was due at least in part to the fact that the English laws distinguishing women's use of property from men's use of property differed significantly from those in the rest of Europe. In other words, the specific gender structure of English property law was at least part of the reason why England was early to develop a capitalist economy and also why the cash economy, the debt credit markets, and public investment apparently spread so completely throughout the society.