Carole Shammas

Re-Assessing the Married Women's Property Acts

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, literally every state in the United States passed laws known as the married womens property acts or adopted a community property system. Around the same time, the British Parliament and the Canadian Provinces approved similar acts.1 Altogether these revisions represented the most substantial change in womens legal status in 700 years of the common law, and contemporary feminists considered the legal changes to be a great victory for the movement. In certain respects, this legislation was analogous to the emancipation proclamations and related acts concerning enslaved persons. Neither resulted in equality. Wives did not suddenly become the equals oftheir husbands any more than freed African Americans became the equals of their former masters. But the legal changes, to a great extent, released both from the patriarchal authority of master and husband and set up new relationships between themselves and the state. Unlike emancipation, however, neither the married womens property acts nor the establishment of community property law has found a place in the pantheon of important historical events. Nor have the past two decades of research in womens history done much to boost their reputation. In this paper, I would like to focus upon these acts in the United States, how they have been evaluated by historians and why we might want to reconsider this evaluation both in respect to womens history and the history of American society in general.

Food Expenditures and Economic Well-Being in Early Modern England

The proportion of a households budget spent on diet has commonly served as an important measure of material welfare. This paper pulls together data concerning trends in food expenditures for early modern England and draws comparisons with figures for later periods. The usefulness of wage assessments, a new source for estimating the proportion of outlays devoted to diet, is examined. The impact on food expenditures of new commodities and other dietary shifts is also explored. The findings call into question earlier estimates of the proportion of total expenditure devoted to food and drink in the pre-industrial period and the assumption that food expenditures are always inelastic.

Constructing a Wealth Distribution from Probate Records

Constructing a Wealth Distribution from Probate Records One of the major problems with using probate records to estimate wealth distribution, wealth levels, and economic growth in early modern communities is that often half or more of the population failed to leave wills and inventories. Generally it is assumed that decedents whose estates were probated were richer than those whose estates were not, but in some cases the very richest persons might have escaped the legal process. There have been a half dozen or more articles and a three

The Determinants of Personal Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England and America

This article explores the determinants of wealth for seventeenth-century Englishmen living in three very different environments—Worcestershire, East London, and Tidewater, Virginia. Wealth differences among these regions can be described in terms of the particular mix of occupational status groups, age groups, and literates each possessed. When all of these variables are accounted for, region becomes an insignificant determinant of wealth. Occupational status, predictably, had the primary influence on wealth, but the system, through provisions for age and education, also made definite allowances for the ability to use and consume resources efficiently.

Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment

Investing in the Early Modern Built Environment represents the first attempt to delve into the period’s enhanced architectural investment—its successes, its failures, and the conflicts it provoked globally.

The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America.

Pre-industrial consumer: Part I: Demand: Household production in early modern England Household production in colonial America Changes in consumer demand Part II: Trends in consumption and standards of living: Food consumption, new commodities, and the transformation in diet Housing, consumer durables, and the domestic environment Part III: Distribution: Hierarchically structured demand and distribution The rise of the English country shop Colonial retailing Conclusion: Economic history, economic theory, and consumption.