ABSTRACT
English legal writers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries never tired of claiming that women were 'a favourite of the law' and even, in the hybrid professional language called law French, 'lour darling'. In the twentieth century all overt legal restrictions have been removed, and yet women as a group remain at a profound economic, social and political disadvantage. The best known aspects of the law respecting women and property are the common law doctrines of covertures in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance. Historians, lawyers, social scientists and literary critics all emphasize these doctrines. Throughout the late medieval and early modern period, the ecclesiastical or civil law idea of community property in marriage and partibility in inheritance came into conflict with the common law idea of covertures in marriage and primogeniture in inheritance. The distribution of property within the family has been largely omitted in the discussion of familial relations, although economic patterns clearly reflect emotional ones.
