The distribution of property in any community reflects a variety of cultural, economic and social influences including, not least, a legal framework that defines property and the rights to use and transfer it. Legal change, in turn, has the capacity to reshape distribution and the complex matrix of culture, society and economy that surrounds access to property. The articles that have been brought together for this special issue of Continuity and Change document and analyse the gendered patterns of ownership in a variety of times and places. Each of the contributors has encountered some difficulty in determining the relevant legal framework, the extent to which laws were enforced, who owned what, patterns of inheritance and the meaning of ownership itself. The authors respond by examining a range of sources with imagination, ingenuity and methodologies that originate in different disciplines. The precise shape of the research of course depends on the circumstances of the particular historical context.

Recent research on both contemporary and historical societies argues for the importance of women's independent access to credit as a positive force for empowerment of the women concerned and for wider economic development. This article investigates this issue for rural England between c.1290 and c.1380 using debt litigation records from two well-documented manor courts. The article concludes that involvement in credit networks brought little female empowerment in medieval English villages because relatively few women acted as independent lenders and borrowers. However, local credit networks featured women more prominently in some places than others, and reasons for this are advanced.

This article discusses how widows and widowers were provided for in early modern Sweden, focussing in particular on the use of wills. The investigated area is the parish of Undersåker in Jämtland, northern Sweden, and the period c. 1750 to 1915. The point of departure is the fact that Swedish medieval and early modern law did give quite strong property rights to widows and widowers. Therefore, if these rights were respected by family members and enforced by the courts, it was hard to see any good reason for taking extra precautions, like making a will to the benefit of the spouse who lived longest. In view of this, the fact that wills were nevertheless set up, albeit rarely, needs explaining. During the period 475 wills were set up, according to the archives. Of these 240 were mutual wills; approximately 3 per cent of all couples set up a mutual will, with the intention of letting the surviving spouse retain the estate undivided. Often, there was a connection between the decision to set up a will and lack of children and/or remarriage. Will-makers came from all social strata, the affluent as well as the quite poor. Sometimes, a series of wills from the same couple has been preserved, indicating that will-making could be part of a long-term strategy of planning for old age and adapting to new circumstances. The general conclusion is that wills can often be seen as a sign of fear: fear that the legal rights with which widows and widowers were invested would not, after all, be respected. This fear appears to have been particularly strong if the couple lacked offspring.

This study examines the role of women in headship and succession in early modern Kyoto using the population registers of two Kyoto neighbourhoods of differing economic status and the private documents of a family business. The private documents allow an examination of the processes and reasons behind inheritance decisions. I find that women could inherit when sons were absent, incapable or unwilling, and heiresses were used to recruit capable outsiders into the bloodline. More than these roles, women played an active part in making and carrying out inheritance decisions even when the heir was male, as well as providing alternatives to the usual succession rules.

In spite of Mexico's numerous efforts at liberal land reform and privatization in the nineteenth century, Totimehuacán (Puebla) maintained significant continuity in land-holding on a family basis. This undermines confidence in the pauperization hypothesis, the view that privatization necessarily dispossessed the indigenous peasantry. Mechanisms of social control and dispute resolution did change, and particular groups such as women and children lost an important defence in property matters. The effect of legislative changes was protracted, however, and mediated by the customary role of patronym groups, an issue which most other studies have ignored. The article concludes that the impact of property reform on women cannot be understood apart from customary, local forms of social organization.

I examine wealth-holding and the share of household wealth owned by women married in the years surrounding the 1870 Married Women's Property Act. The Act, which gave women married after 1870 the right to own and control personal property, serves as a natural experiment to examine the extent to which individuals respond to the law. I link wealth-holding data to census information and find that, as a result of the Act, women married after 1870 shifted their wealth-holding away from real property to personal property. Moreover, women married after the Act owned a larger share of household wealth than women married before the Act.

This article examines patterns of property-holding in an Ontario town before and after legislation in 1872 and 1884 that permitted married women to hold property in their own name. The experience of Guelph follows that of other North American urban communities in which women substantially increased their share of urban property during this period. Single and widowed women achieved most of the gains although married women also increased their holding of real property. Indicators of long-term change derived from assessment records, census manuscripts, wills, mortgages and property transfers support the hypothesis that the legislation was instrumental in the rise of female ownership. The effect of the law was felt through various channels of causation, including a change in inheritance practice that favoured women.