Bøker av Jennifer Aston

This book considers the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Acts and their significant impact on previously invisible married women in the 19th Century. Tens of thousands of women used little-known sections of the Acts to apply for orders from local magistrates' courts to reclaim their rights of testation, inheritance, property ownership, and (dependent on local franchise qualifications) ability to vote. By examining the orders which were made and considering the women who applied for them, the book challenges the mistaken belief that Victorian England and Wales were nations of married, cohabiting couples with an extremely small population of divorcees. The detailed statistical analysis and rich case studies provide a totally new perspective on the legal status and experiences of married women in England and Wales. Although many thousands of orders were granted between 1858 and 1900, their details remain unknown and unexamined, primarily because census records did not consistently record dissolved marriages and there is no central index of applications made. Using sources including court records, parliamentary papers, newspaper reports, census returns, probate records and trade directories, this book reconstructs the successful - and unsuccessful - experiences of women applying to magistrates' courts to protect their assets across regions and decades.

Aston challenges and reshapes the on-going debate concerning social status, economic opportunity, and gender roles in nineteenth-century society.

Women and the Land examines English women's legal rights to land and the reality and consequences of their land ownership over four centuries.Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularly for women. The focus is especially on land, residential buildings and commercial property, but livestock, common and personal property also feature. This project is drivenby an explicitly feminist agenda: the contributors directly challenge the idea that the existence of patriarchal property relations - including the doctrine of coverture and gendered inheritance practices - meant that property wasconcentrated in exclusively male hands. Here a very different story is told: of significant levels of female landownership and how women's desire to own property and manage its profits led to emotional attachments to land and a willingness and determination to fight for the right to legal title. Altogether, the chapters in this volume offer new histories of land and property which hold women's lives as their centre. Presenting the very latest qualitativeand quantitative research on women's landownership, the book will be of interest to those working in social, economic and cultural history, historical and cultural geography, women's studies, gender studies and landscape studies. AMANDA CAPERN is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women's History at the University of Hull. BRIONY MCDONAGH is Senior Lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull. JENNIFER ASTON is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Northumbria University. CONTRIBUTORS: Jennifer Aston, Stephen Bending, Amanda L. Capern, Janet Casson, Amy Erickson, Amanda Flather, Joan Heggie, Jessica L. Malay, Briony McDonagh, Judith Spicksley, Jon Stobart, Hannah Worthen