Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, women's role in
the Swedish economy was renegotiated and reconceptualized. Maria
Agren chronicles changes in married women's property rights,
revealing the story of Swedish women's property as not just a
simple narrative of the erosion of legal rights, but a more complex
tale of unintended consequences.
A public sphere of influence--including the wife's family and the
local community--held sway over spousal property rights throughout
most of the seventeenth century, Agren argues. Around 1700, a
campaign to codify spousal property rights as an
arcanum
domesticum, or domestic secret, aimed to increase efficiency in
legal decision making. New regulatory changes indeed reduced
familial interference, but they also made families less likely to
give land to women.
The advent of the print medium ushered property issues back into
the public sphere, this time on a national scale, Agren explains.
Mass politicization increased sympathy for women, and public debate
popularized more progressive ideas about the economic contributions
of women to marriage, leading to mid-nineteenth-century legal
reforms that were more favorable to women. Agren's work enhances
our understanding of how societies have conceived of women's
contributions to the fundamental institutions of marriage and the
family, using as an example a country with far-reaching influence
during and after the Enlightenment.