ABSTRACT
Understanding female agency requires us to be aware of women’s legal rights because these are central to opening or closing avenues for female initiative. Thus, before examining the reality of women’s economic activity, we need to explore more closely the wide range of legal capacities which shaped their economic spaces, which defined their economic autonomy and, finally, which determined what value their property, their word and their honour had in eighteenth-century towns. One needs to recall that to engage in the market or to develop even a very small enterprise, women needed access to property rights, to the capacity of acquiring and selling freely and hence to be able to enter into legally binding arrangements. Last but not least it also meant being able to safeguard these capacities in law. In a period when private and public were largely interdependent and when economic success was dependent on the prince and corporate structures that bestowed economic privileges, trading rights and monopolies, the ability to play a role in politics was essential for building up, holding onto and consolidating wealth. But not everyone has the same capacity to develop strategies, as Amartya Sen demonstrated when he introduced the concept of ‘capability’—that is, ‘what a person can do or can be’. 1 Capability involves an understanding of the individual’s freedom to operate and an ability to participate in economic, social and political actions. And women’s agency is therefore crucial to an assessment of their capabilities, in the context of whether economic, social or political barriers restrain a person’s ability to pursue substantive freedoms.
