Women, Real Estate, and Wealth in a Southern US County, 1780–1860

Abstract

In her 1986 book Women and the Law of Property in Early America, Marylynn Salmon concludes that the legal and economic changes experienced by early national and antebellum (pre–Civil War) United States women – which culminated in the passage of married women's property acts – were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. This paper examines changes in the economic status of women preceding the enactment of these statutes by analyzing new and valuable information: real-estate deeds and probate records in Henrico County, Virginia. Supplementing the diverse, yet limited, international and historical evidence on women's wealth holdings, this exploration of the asset accumulation of elite, free women in the southern US reveals that women's property holdings, personal and real, rose substantially over the 1780–1860 period. Thus, these results are consistent with those of other scholars, such as Marylynn Salmon, who document an increase in early national and antebellum women's economic status.

Keywords:

• US women and wealth
• assets
• real estate
• gender differences

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Dr. Stanley Engerman, Dr. James Irwin, Ms. Diana Rankin, and Dr. Jason Taylor for their comments and support. Sergie Rakhmayil, Marina Sidelnikova, and Neil Snyder's research assistance was instrumental. Also, comments from many anonymous journal referees and the discussants and participants of Session 34B of the 2000 Southern Economic Association Meeting were very helpful. This project was partially funded by a Faculty Research and Premier Display Grant from Central Michigan University.

Notes

¹ Carmen Diana Deere and Cheryl Doss (2006) discuss the importance of studying women's relationships to wealth in their extensive overview of literature on the gender wealth gap.

² See Deere and Doss (2006) for a literature review on available evidence.

³ See Norma Basch (1982), Richard Chused (1983), Marylynn Salmon (1986), and Warbasse (1987) for early discussions of the restrictive nature of the legal standing of women in early America. For more recent discussions of female dependency under common law, some of which note that the reality of women's status was frequently at odds with the strict interpretation of the law, see Mary Lyndon Shanley (1989), Susan Staves (1990), Amy Louise Erickson (1993), Robert John Morris (1994), Richard Geddes and Dean Lueck (2002), and Amy Gignesi (2004). For a more general view of women's changing status in America, see Linda K. Kerber (1997, 1998). Also, Linda Sturtz (2002) provides a thorough background on Virginia women's legal standing.

⁴ Some evidence suggests that the change in expectations started much earlier (Jeanne Boydston 1990: pp. 1–29). For summaries of the colonial “golden age” view and subsequent research rebutting it, see Suzanne Lebsock (1984: 49) and Boydston (1990: pp. ix–xx).

⁵ This view was expressed in magazines, newspapers, and books of the period that celebrated the virtues of women and the cult of True Womanhood: “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Barbara Welter 1966: 152). See Julie A. Matthaei (1982), Suzanne Lebsock (1984, 1987), Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1988), and Cynthia A. Kierner (1998) for discussions of the domestic role of women nationally and in the US South in this period.

⁶ Legislation differed from state to state. Although by 1861 eighteen of the thirty-one states surveyed by Warbasse (1987: 278–9) had enacted major reforms allowing women to hold and transfer real property, three states (Virginia, South Carolina, and Delaware) had not undertaken any reform measures at all.

⁷ Some scholars see this as a period of a declining market role for women in general. For example, Gerda Lerner (1979), Barbara Epstein (1982), Matthaei (1982), and Claudia Goldin (1990) maintain that prior to the separation of labor into market and home production in the nineteenth century, women had a larger role in the market economy. As the nineteenth century progressed, the extra-domestic participation of women waned. The magnitude and variety of market work by women lessened, as did their direct involvement in public activities. See Kierner (1998) for an in-depth discussion of the public role of women.

⁸ Soltow bases this figure on his own estimate of the aggregate wealth of women and children in 1860 as 7.8 percent of men's wealth.

⁹ Overall, Shammas (1994: 21) finds that by 1880, women comprised over one-third of all testators in all regions studied, and women's share of total wealth rose but differed across regions.

¹⁰ International evidence from Great Britain (Mary Beth Combs 2006), Canada (Susan Ingram and Kris Inwood 2000; Kris Inwood and Sarah Van Sligtenhorst 2004), and Russia (Michelle Maresse 2002) lends conditional support to this view, with certain groups of women benefiting greatly from the passage of married women's property acts. Based on inheritance tax records and census data, Mary Beth Combs (2000, 2004a) finds evidence that Britain's Married Women's Property Act of 1870 considerably increased middle-class women's control of property. Maresse's (2002) extensive study of notarial records documents an increase in married Russian noblewomen's role in the real-estate market after passage of a 1753 law giving married women control over their property. Ingram and Inwood's (2000) analysis of assessment records in Ontario indicates that women's (mainly single, but also married) holdings of property rose substantially after the passage of married women's property laws in 1872 and 1884.

¹¹ Women's participation in the Petersburg real-estate market increased, as evinced by a rise in the proportion of real-estate owners who were women. Lebsock (1984: 129–30) finds that the county land books reveal that the percentage of women real-estate owners rose from 8.4 percent in 1790 to 28.7 percent in 1860. For discussions of real estate held by women in other countries and under alternative legal systems, see Kimberly Gauderman's (2003) discussion of colonial Quito (Ecuador), James Lockhart's (1994) analysis of sixteenth-century Peru, and Paula J. Byrne's (1999) look at nineteenth-century Sydney, Australia.

¹² In addition, Schweninger (1990/1999: 23–4) notes that in Virginia, both the number and average dollar amount of real property holdings by free black women rose from 234 and $537 in 1850 to 391 and $638, respectively, in 1860.

¹³ A limited amount of work has been done on real-estate transactions in the US and other countries. For the US, Lebsock's (1984: 129–30) survey of county deed books found that the number of realty transactions made by women rose from 25 for the 1784–1800 period to 272 for the 1851–60 period. In addition, Wood confirms women's participation in land exchanges and goes so far as to suggest: “Slaveholding widows virtually collapsed any distinctions between male and female spheres of knowledge and activity” (2004: 90). Maresse's (2002) extensive study of married Russian noblewomen from 1700 to 1861 documents a changing and important role of women in the real-estate market. Using notarial records from five regions in Russia, Maresse finds that women traders in the real-estate market increased from the early 1700s to the mid-1800s. From 1715 to 1720, women were sellers in 17 percent of the transactions and buyers in 5 percent. This increased to 46 percent of sellers and 43 percent of buyers from 1855 to 1860 (Maresse 2002: 107–8). Maresse compares these statistics favorably to evidence for medieval France and Spain, where women acted as traders in 9–13 percent and 18 percent, respectively (112). These married Russian noblewomen also participated at a higher level than Ontario women, whom Ingram and Inwood (2000: 423) find undertaking 5–7 percent of sales and a slightly greater portion of purchases of real estate until the late 1800s.

¹⁴ See James River Genealogy for a discussion of Henrico's history and links to online resources.

¹⁵ Not only was Virginia first in population, first in the number of farmers (producing primarily tobacco and wheat [William G. Shade 1996: 31]), and first in residence of US presidents (Fischer and Kelly 2000: 202), it was also first in domestic exports (Arthur G. Peterson 1930: 306).

¹⁶ See James Irwin (2004: 85, footnote 42) and the references therein for a discussion of the consensus view.

¹⁷ Virginia was the largest exporter of domestic products in the late eighteenth century, and the custom-house district of Bermuda Hundred (which eventually included Richmond and Petersburg) ranked first in Virginia's exports (Peterson 1930: 306, 308). The discussion of real-estate price movements is based on my analysis of the Henrico County deeds.

¹⁸ Donald R. Adams, Jr.'s (1986: 630) price index of Maryland meat and grain products peaked in 1816.

¹⁹ Fischer and Kelly also note the extreme movement in land values, stating: “Land values in the Old Dominion plummeted from $207 million in 1817 to merely $90 million in 1829” (2000: 202).

²⁰ Arthur G. Peterson (1940: 101) suggests that the drastic fall in land prices during the Panic of 1837 in part caused agricultural production in Virginia in 1839 to drop to a level similar to that before the Revolutionary War.

²¹ See Irwin (2004: 280) for a table illustrating the rising value of capital, financial assets, and slaves in Virginia. Henrico County's real-estate prices grew at an annual average of 3.9 percent per year over this period according to my analysis of Henrico County deed records.

²² Henrico County did continue to grow in population from just under 15,000 residents in 1800 to over 61,000 in 1860 (US Bureau of the Census 1999).

²³ See Matthaei (1982), Lebsock (1984), Fox-Genovese (1988), and Boydston (1990) for discussions on the domestic role of women nationally and in the US South in this period.

²⁴ Personal property included items such as jewelry, cash, furniture, and clothing, while real property consisted of immovables such as houses and land (Combs 2004a: 141, 143).

²⁵ Shanley (1989), Staves (1990), Erickson (1993), Geddes and Lueck (2002), and others have suggested that the “legal fiction” of coverture may be different from the reality (Mary Beth Combs 2004b: 144).

²⁶ In Virginia, a private interview of the wife was legally required for the conveyance of real estate in order to prevent a husband from coercing his spouse into selling her property. This secured the sale against claims by the wife or her heirs to her dower share (one-third) of the land after the husband's death (Salmon 1986: 14–9). See Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michel Dahlin (1987), for a comprehensive discussion of inheritance rights of US women from colonial times through the twentieth century. As noted in the text, Virginia eventually passed a married women's property act in 1877 (Warbasse 1987: 306).

²⁷ See Erickson (1993) for an extensive discussion of the origin of equity law and its interactions with common, ecclesiastical, and manorial laws.

²⁸ Erickson (1993: 225–6) suggests that up to 10 percent of women not belonging to the nobility in early modern England were able to establish separate property holdings primarily through simple bonds, thus securing many of the same opportunities provided to wealthy women by the Chancery Courts.

²⁹ Norma Basch (1979: 349), Chused (1983: 1361), and Shammas (1994: 11) note that the economic crises of the late 1830s may have induced some states to pass statutes excluding family assets brought into the marriage by a woman from being used to pay her husband's debt. Lebsock (1984: 60) identifies debt protection as a primary reason for the increase in separate estates in Petersburg, Virginia. Also see Shanley (1989), Amy Louise Erickson (1990), and Staves (1990) for a look at the use of separate estates in early modern England and Maria Ågren (2004) for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden.

³⁰ Although Geddes and Lueck also suggest that those states with courts of Chancery were able to “contract around coverture” and were less likely to pass women's property acts (2002: 1087), their empirical analysis does not support this view.

³¹ Thanks to James R. Irwin for sharing his collection of inventories. See Irwin (2004) for a more complete description of the data, as well as a discussion of wealth in antebellum Virginia. In general, only the wealthier segment of decedents was probated. As with other findings based on these sorts of records, they do not tell the story of the poor.

³² Surveying death duty registers in Great Britain for 1860, Combs (2000: 44) found that 17.7 percent of wills were women's.

³³ These gender differences in means are all statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence interval. A similar, if less dramatic, pattern is found in the medians with an average personal estate of $734 for women and $1,260 for men. Because the US was on a gold standard over this period, these prices are already in “real” (gold) terms. However, when converted into constant 1858 dollar terms using Paul A. David and Peter Solar's (1977) index of consumer prices, the relative positions and magnitudes of the averages remain the same: a personal estate of $1,537 for women and $2,951 for men; $1,111 in slave holdings for women and $1,820 for men; $295 in physical assets for women and $775 for men. It is also worth noting that there was little systematic inflation over this period.

³⁴ The gender differences in the proportions of total personal estate held as slaves and physical assets are statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level.

³⁵ When converted into constant 1858 dollar terms using David and Solar's (1977) index of consumer prices, the relative positions and magnitudes of the averages remain the same: women's average personal estate rose from $441 to $1,865, while men's rose from $1,778 to $3,947 from the first to second half of the period under investigation, respectively.

³⁶ Note that this rise is statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

³⁷ The increases in personal wealth over time are statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

³⁸ A similar pattern of expansion in both the percentage of female decedents and of women's wealth holdings is evident in Irwin's (2004) full sample of almost 6,000 inventories covering six counties of eastern Virginia. Analysis of the pattern of women's wealth holdings in these counties will be the topic of a separate study.

³⁹ Key demographic indicators related to the proportion of women in the population remained stable over this period. In 1810, white adult women represented 46 percent of the white adult population in Henrico County. (Adult is defined as greater than 16 years old, and the Henrico County numbers include Richmond.) By 1860 white adult women comprised 47.5 percent of this category. In addition, the proportion of potential widows (proxying for changes in relative life expectancy) does not appear to change. Older women (greater than 45 years of age), representing potential widows, are estimated between 19 percent and 20 percent of the total adult population in both periods. (The 1810 figures were calculated from census population numbers [US Bureau of the Census 1811/1976: 54a, 55a]. The 1860 numbers were calculated from US Bureau of the Census data [1864: 500–1]).

⁴⁰ See Gallman (2000: 6) for a discussion of price level changes in the nineteenth century.

⁴¹ In order to contribute to our understanding of why women's asset accumulation changed over time, future research will analyze the relationship between business cycle fluctuations and women's asset accumulation.

⁴² Mary Beth Combs (2004a, 2004b, 2005) suggests that the married women's property acts in England not only altered the level of asset accumulation by women, but also the composition, shifting out of real property and into personal property. The source of the portfolio changes documented for Henrico County women is a potential topic for further analysis.

⁴³ See Lebsock (1984: 54–86) for an extensive discussion of the use of separate estates in Petersburg, Virginia.

⁴⁴ In order to analyze market exchanges, this study restricts attention to the deeds of “voluntary” exchanges, excluding sales of land to pay taxes or debts.

⁴⁵ Family relationship was inferred either from an expressed relationship stated in the deed or from the buyers and sellers having the same last name. Although most traders hailed from Henrico County, some lived as far away as London, Michigan, Missouri, New Orleans, and Memphis.

⁴⁶ The average trader bought and sold from relatives in 10 percent of exchanges.

⁴⁷ The mean price per acre is weighted by acreage. The average exchange was 52.1 acres at $17.18. Again, because the US was on a gold standard over this period, these prices are already in “real” (gold) terms. However, when converted into constant 1858 dollar terms using David and Solar's (1977) index of consumer prices, the relative positions and magnitudes of price per acre remain the same: $14.24 for all traders; $24.61 for female buyers and $13.81 for male buyers; and $8.51 for female sellers and $12.08 for male sellers.

⁴⁸ The difference between the average price per acre sold by men and that sold by women is not statistically significant.

⁴⁹ The difference between the average price per acre bought by men and that bought by women is statistically significant at the 95 percent confidence level. Regression results based on these Henrico deeds indicate that even when taking into account differences in property amenities and location, female sellers received a statistically significant lower price, just 65 percent of the price obtained by male sellers.

⁵⁰ Total traders is equal to twice the number of trades because there is both a buyer and seller in each trade. The time period was divided in half for analysis to emphasize the measured differences in women's participation from the early national period to the antebellum period.

⁵¹ The change over time in the proportion of female traders is significant at the 95 percent confidence level, with the proportion of female buyers significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

⁵² Each of these changes over time in the proportion of real estate exchanged by women is statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level.

⁵³ Single women comprised over one-third of Petersburg's free women by 1860 (Lebsock 1984: 116). In addition, remarriage rates fell dramatically from 55 percent in 1784–1800 to 44 percent in 1821–50 (Lebsock 1984: 268).

⁵⁴ For discussion of real estate held by women in other countries and under alternative legal systems, see Lockhart's (1994) analysis of sixteenth-century Peru; Byrne's (1999) look at nineteenth-century Sydney, Australia; Maresse's (2002) book on Russian noblewomen; and Gauderman's (2003) discussion of colonial Quito (Ecuador).

⁵⁵ Lebsock (1984: 268) notes the decline in remarriage rates in Petersburg over this period. From 1784 to 1800, 55 percent of widows remarried. By 1821–50, this rate had fallen to 44 percent.