ABSTRACT
London was a vigorous and a forward-looking city not only in the immensity and the boldness of its charitable dispositions but likewise in the organization of the social system which created and disposed this wealth. It was accordingly a community in which the status of women was particularly advanced and in which their property rights enjoyed substantial respect. The merchant class tended to contract its marriages within a quite strictly defined fraternity of commerce, and the widow of a merchant, on whom the pressures for remarriage were very heavy indeed, normally married within the circle of her late husband's livery. In point of fact, in hundreds of wills of the period husbands all but prescribed the remarriage of their widows by careful property dispositions which made it at once difficult and unrewarding if the widow married outside the company of the late spouse. Within this tightly knit community, which respected property quite as much as sentiment, the position of the wife who had brought a marriage settlement to her husband's business or the widow who had been left with working control of a substantial trading firm was very secure indeed. In an age of heavy mortality among men in their early prime, substantial wealth found its way into the hands of women, much of which was disposable and most of which seems to have been managed with a prudence and success suggesting how fully women bred and married in this remarkable class had absorbed its mores and values. We shall likewise have occasion to comment on a considerable number of charities, often very large ones, which were evidently the creation of merchant couples, the survivor completing or augmenting the sometimes most elaborate design begun by the spouse who happened to die first. We are, then, dealing with a period in which the legal rights of women were improving slowly indeed, but in which the status of women and their actual rights were undergoing substantial amelioration in all urban communities, and particularly in London. 1
