Gender and inheritance patterns in rural Europe: Women as wives, widows, daughters and sisters

ABSTRACT

The paper presents a broad historical analysis of literature on European rural societies, which started in the 1970s until the 1990s, and produced a host of information regarding kinship, the variety of inheritance patterns, and local legal systems. Those issues were all dealing with what was then called the “social division of sexes” inside domestic groups. If not addressed directly, the topic of gender, however, was present, as greatly influenced by Jack Goody's position regarding women's position in diverging devolution patterns in relation to the diversity of economic activities, should they be agriculturalists or pastoralists. When re-examined under the new scope of gender, these rich monographies yield a host of information on the possibility for women's agency, although set in a strict patriarchal context.

KEYWORDS:

• Inheritance patterns
• domestic group
• Europe
• dowry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There are many reasons why Lacombe’s work largely became forgotten. The book he devoted to the history of marriage was reprinted recently (2009) though. Moreover, a conference was organized to understand this strange personality whose work, contemporary to Durkheim’s, did not reach a wide audience, neither at the time of publication nor nowadays (Adell et Fine, 2012).

2 The scheme proposed by Haudricourt has stirred a number of criticisms against its wide generalizations, and yet it is recognized as an eye-opening framework within which to set the diversity of ethnographic situations (Ferret 2014).