Women and wealth in Sweden: the case of Uppsala, 1850–1910

ABSTRACT

In the Swedish context, fairly little is known about the variation in the level and composition of female wealth over the long term. This paper aims to contribute to filling this gap, emphasising the main features of unmarried women's wealth and assessing how it evolved during the second half of the nineteenth century. To this end, the study relies on a sample of about 500 probate inventories drawn up in the city of Uppsala between 1850 and 1910. The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of transformation encompassing several aspects of Swedish society. The change included the economic and financial structure of the country, as well as the legal framework and the labour market. The research proves that unmarried women's wealth increased in the period here analysed, even though dissimilarly between spinsters and widows. Their wealth changed also from a qualitative point of view, as shown by the increasing presence of specific assets such as real estate and stocks recorded in their inventories. Among the several factors that can be retraced at the origins of this phenomenon, the development of a more equal legal framework and the evolution of the housing market seemed to have played a major role.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender history
• gender wealth gap
• wealth inequalities
• nineteenth-century
• Sweden

JEL-CODES:

• N23
• N33
• N93
• G21

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Prof. Elise Dermineur, Prof. Gonzalo Pozo Martin, Dr Mattia Viale and all the participants at the EHFF seminarium at the Stockholm School of Economics for their invaluable comments and suggestions. He is also grateful to Robert Eckeryd and Martin Almbjär for their help in the data collection.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See, among others, Bengtsson et al., 2018; Bengtsson & Svensson, 2019; Lindberg, 2007; Lindgren, 2002.

2 Uppsala rådhusrätt och magistrat FII (48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 70, 90); Uppsala Universitetsarkiv, EIII (204, 205). The exact numeration is available upon request ([email protected]).

3 The analysis of the sample of probate inventories confirmed that married men's and women's wealth follows roughly the same pattern; it is a further confirmation that it is reasonable to consider them as a single group.

4 However, husbands could not sell or use as collateral the real estate of their wives without their consent.

5 For instance, see Fauve-Camoux, 1998 for the French case.

6 Even though the sample includes all the inventories regardless of the age of the decedents, the representativeness test considers only those who were more than twenty years of age when they died. In fact, the youngest decedents were only rarely economically independent, and there was no need to draw up an inventory (Lindgren, 2002, pp. 821–822): this explains why, if we consider just the younger decedents, representativity falls to around 2–3 per cent of the total.

7 However, an examination of professional status proves that many spinsters belonged to the middle and lower strata of the society, suggesting a varied social composition of the sample (see section 3).

8 Values are always corrected for inflation using the CPI available in Edvinsson & Söderberg, 2010, p. 1914 = 100%

9 However, there are few studies on the evolution of land prices, especially in the nineteenth century; for instance, Edvinsson and Söderberg retraced land prices in east Sweden between 1294 and 1651; see Edvinsson & Söderberg, 2010, pp. 440–442.

10 For instance, the net value of the richer inventory was 115 times higher than the average.

11 See the Canadian case in Di Matteo, 2008.

12 All values in crowns have been corrected for inflation using the consumer price index available in Edvinsson & Söderberg, 2010, p. 443.

13 As a double-check, I analysed a sample of 129 inventories drawn up in 1891, and I found that the overall value of the real estate was even higher than in 1890.

14 For every 100 wives, there were 81 spinsters and 27 widows; for every 1,000 men there were 3,660 women (1901); see Rutterford & Maltby, 2006, p. 118.

15 As I already said, medium and lower strata are under-represented but not completely missing.

16 They got limits of course: for instance, husbands could not sell or use the land as collateral without the authorisation of the wife; see Ågren, 2009, pp. 71–84.

17 Cash has been excluded because, even if it is listed in more than 50 per cent of inventories, its incidence on the overall value is quite limited.

18 It is not clear the role of the sons and the daughters of the couple in the management of family assets, however when the husband died ‘there has been a change toward a more “aggressive” management characterised by a strong indebtedness and investment in more diversified sectors’ (Pompermaier, 2021, p. 21).

19 The same proportion between bank accounts and promissory notes can be found in the first quintile as in the last quintile of the sample.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius Stiftelse samt Tore Browaldhs Stiftelse Wallander and Tom Hedelius Foundation (grant P0017-0040).