Dower Is Not Enough: The Case of Lady Anne Clifford

carla spivack, oklahoma city university

Abstract

The article uses a seventeenth century Englishwoman’s legal battles for her property rights to intervene in contemporary debates about spousal inheritance, specifically, debates about whether a surviving spouse should have to accept a life estate, rather than absolute ownership, as her spousal share.

Clifford spent much of her life fighting for her right to her father’s estates which he had willed – she claimed illegally – to his brother instead of to her, and ultimately won. Her diaries and autobiography, the earliest in English by a woman, which record her struggle, show clearly how her full ownership rights in the lands allowed her to constitute an identity not constrained by gender roles but rather one of full civic personhood in the public sphere which transcended the limitations her society placed on women. I then apply this illustration to the contemporary issue of a surviving spouse’s share of her husband’s estate – an issue I place in gendered terms because of women’s greater likelihood of outliving men.

I argue that what Clifford’s story helps us understand is that women’s right to receive a spousal share that consists of absolute ownership rights, rather than mere life interests, is crucial to women’s civic status and citizenship today. What Clifford’s writings show us is how all three aspects of full ownership – possession, enjoyment and alienation – create full civic personhood in the person exercising those rights because that exercise establishes the owner as a rights bearing subject equal to other rights bearing subjects. Requiring spouses to accept life estates thus profoundly undermines women’s standing as full subjects in society by depriving them of a large part of these rights and in turn, the possibility of being recognized as rights bearing subjects.