This chapter aims to advance knowledge about women's involvement with property transfer and the wider property market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The findings arise from a pilot study using the Register of Deeds for the North Riding of Yorkshire, a rich but under-utilised resource that allows the systematic, if not perfect, quantification of women’s involvement with property, as well as some insight into their status in society. Index Ledgers and related Deeds Registers were selected for the study covering two five-year periods, 1785–89 and 1885–89, and containing 5,032 and 14,481 unique transactions respectively. This chapter provides detailed insight into women's involvement with property during these two moments in time, as well as capturing the impact of the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 and of changes to the method of recording and indexing transactions introduced in 1885. The results presented are not a quantification of women's property ownership per se, but of the number of women involved with property during the periods examined and their proportion in relation to men transacting in the same periods. The study uses marital status as the primary method of analysis to ascertain differences in property involvement behaviour between women and across time.

The chapter is structured around four key thematic findings. Firstly, analysis reveals distinctive patterns of female property involvement by gender and marital status, as well as between rural, coastal and industrial townships. Secondly, while there was clear concentration of women's involvement within the categories of conveyancing, mortgages and indentures, their participation across these categories differed significantly by marital status. Of all marital status categories, unmarried women's participation with property increased the most and almost half of all married women's property transactions in 1885–89 were carried out independently of their husbands. Thirdly, there was a growth of women-to-women transactions both within and across the two periods, again with varying patterns of participation by marital status. Finally, registration of female wills increased, suggesting a growth in the number of women who owned property at death in the North Riding of Yorkshire. The study provides a new resource to examine the complex and varied ways that women and men participated in the property market in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including a unique dataset of 6,755 individual women that will support further scholarship in this area.