Article on Fully Vested Ownership in Property and Women
This article presents a case study from seventeenth century England to illustrate the connection between fully-vested ownership in property and full civic personhood for women. Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) spent most of her adult life litigating her rights to ancestral lands her father had willed to his brother rather than to her. Clifford’s life and writings make clear that the property rights she fought for and won granted her an identity not fully constrained by her culture’s gender norms. These rights allowed her to take her place in the web of mutual rights and obligations attendant on fully-vested property holding, and thus allowed her to take her place in civil society as a full person, a subject who acted rather than an object who was acted upon. The texts through which Clifford constructed her identity – her diaries and autobiography, her building projects, and the art works and monuments she commissioned – show how her fully-vested property rights gave her a sense of full civic personhood, embedded as a subject in history and in the society of her day.
Scholars have read Clifford’s works as expressing an early feminism, a challenge to patriarchal systems of land transmission, but such readings are anachronistic. Indeed, the truth of the matter is much more interesting: rather than claiming gender equality, Clifford saw her property rights as granting her equality under the norms of her day despite her gender. It is only after taking both legal and physical possession of her lands that Clifford begins to assert her rights as a woman. In fact, Clifford’s writing itself is anachronistic: she constituted her identity through forms of property ownership that derived from an earlier feudal period and were becoming increasingly unavailable for women during Clifford’s lifetime. Absolute property ownership granted her a sense of identity based on recognition as a subject embedded in a network of rights and obligations, a system ultimately traceable to the Norman feudalism brought to England by Clifford’s ancestors. It was a system in which women as well as men could carry out feudal obligations because of their ancestry and place in the feudal order, which in turn stemmed from land ownership. Rank could be as important as sex in locating one in the social hierarchy. This understanding of the real nature of Clifford’s claims leads to a crucial insight about property rights and the status of women: fully-vested ownership created for Clifford the basis for full civic personhood, and that in turn allowed her to assert her gender-based rights.
Part One of this article outlines Anne Clifford’s life. Part Two explains the legal background for Clifford’s litigation, showing that it took place in the context of declining female inheritance and declining female participation in the public sphere. Part Three discusses Clifford’s writings, arguing that her property interests allowed her to construct a sense of identity apart from her culture’s gender-based prescriptions. Part Four analyzes Clifford’s self-construction as it is reflected in the many buildings, monuments and self portraits she designed and commissioned, also arguing that they reveal a sense of identity empowered by fully vested property ownership to transcend some of the limitations her culture imposed on her sex. I conclude by suggesting that Clifford’s example has implications for today, in respect to the many ways women’s access to property is still systemically limited to less than fully vested rights.