Gender and Wealth Preservation: ‘I’m Not a Member of My Husband’s Family’

Abstract

This chapter examines questions of business ownership, the conservation of wealth and gender power in the family firm. In particular, it focuses on the relationship between primogeniture, the conservation of established wealth and women’s exclusion from ownership. It argues that primogeniture accounts for the exclusion of female kin from ownership. The culture of primogeniture (Thompson, 1976; Clemenson, 1982) refers to the practice of impartible’ inheritance and is characterised in the practice of passing on the core unit of productive capital, the family firm, or estate intact along the male line to the eldest son. This chapter suggests that although it is rooted in and is a legacy of the landed sector, it is part of a wider class strategy that is principally concerned with transferring and safeguarding wealth. Exclusionary in character, it circumscribes women’s rights to property and is widely practised by the families studied, regardless of sector. Engels (1972) argues that this feature of female subordination is also manifest in the different class positions of the spouses, husbands being in the ruling class, while wives are more properly located within the working class. Whilst recognising that there are some important material differences between workingand middle-class women, nevertheless, like working-class women, female kin too work in the family enterprise and rarely acquire ownership.