IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/femeco/v12y2006i1-2p51-83.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cui Bono? The 1870 British Married Women'S Property Act, Bargaining Power, And The Distribution Of Resources Within Marriage

Author

Listed:
  • Mary Beth Combs

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Mary Beth Combs, 2006. "Cui Bono? The 1870 British Married Women'S Property Act, Bargaining Power, And The Distribution Of Resources Within Marriage," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1-2), pages 51-83.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:12:y:2006:i:1-2:p:51-83
    DOI: 10.1080/13545700500508262
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13545700500508262
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13545700500508262?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kanbur, R., 1991. "Linear Expenditure Systems, Children as Public Goods and Intra-Household Inequality," Papers 104, Warwick - Development Economics Research Centre.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hyland, Marie & Djankov, Simeon & Goldberg, Pinelopi, 2021. "Do gendered laws matter?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 118845, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Doss, Cheryl R. & Meinzen-Dick, Ruth, 2015. "Collective Action within the Household: Insights from Natural Resource Management," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 171-183.
    3. B. Zorina Khan, 2024. "‘A new way by her invented’: Women inventors and technological innovation in Britain, 1800–1930," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 77(3), pages 928-952, August.
    4. Hyland,Marie Caitriona & Islam,Asif Mohammed, 2021. "Gendered Laws, Informal Origins, and Subsequent Performance," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9766, The World Bank.
    5. Janette Rutterford & David R. Green & Josephine Maltby & Alastair Owens, 2011. "Who comprised the nation of shareholders? Gender and investment in Great Britain, c. 1870–1935," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 64(1), pages 157-187, February.
    6. Janette Rutterford & Josephine Maltby, 2006. "“The Widow, The Clergyman And The Reckless”: Women Investors In England, 1830—1914," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(1-2), pages 111-138.
    7. Carmen Deere & Abena Oduro & Hema Swaminathan & Cheryl Doss, 2013. "Property rights and the gender distribution of wealth in Ecuador, Ghana and India," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 11(2), pages 249-265, June.
    8. Doss, Cheryl & Kim, Sung Mi & Njuki, Jemimah & Hillenbrand, Emily & Miruka, Maureen, 2014. "Women’s individual and joint property ownership: Effects on household decisionmaking:," IFPRI discussion papers 1347, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Fletschner, Diana, 2000. "Enhancing Rural Women's Access to Capital: Why It Is Important and How It Can Be Done. The Case of Colombia," Staff Paper Series 437, University of Wisconsin, Agricultural and Applied Economics.
    2. Udry, Christopher & Hoddinott, John & Alderman, Harold & Haddad, Lawrence, 1995. "Gender differentials in farm productivity: implications for household efficiency and agricultural policy," Food Policy, Elsevier, vol. 20(5), pages 407-423, October.
    3. Alderman, Harold & Hoddinott, John & Haddad, Lawrence James & Udry, Christopher, 1995. "Gender differentials in farm productivity," FCND discussion papers 6, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    4. Langat, Cheruiyot Peter, 2016. "Intrahousehold Decision Making And Implications On Food Security Among Smallholder Farmers In Chepalungu Constituency, Bomet County, Kenya," Research Theses 265575, Collaborative Masters Program in Agricultural and Applied Economics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics of the family; British women's property rights; bargaining power; intrahousehold resource distribution; JEL Codes: N13; D13; K11;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • N13 - Economic History - - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics; Industrial Structure; Growth; Fluctuations - - - Europe: Pre-1913
    • D13 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Household Production and Intrahouse Allocation
    • K11 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Property Law

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:femeco:v:12:y:2006:i:1-2:p:51-83. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFEC20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.