ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the ways gender mattered to propertied women's estate management. It has pointed to the differences in being a female rather than a male landowner, constrained as propertied women were by the law on coverture, by educational norms for girls, and by footwear and fashion amongst other things. In asking what estate management meant to female landowners, the chapter explores propertied women's contributions as at once a familial duty, a wider social responsibility and an opportunity for personal intellectual achievement and emotional fulfilment. The fact that women were often assumed to know little about farming and agricultural improvement potentially made for difficult conversations between propertied women and their social inferiors, including both tenant farmers and employees like estate stewards. The pride in estate management demonstrated by Prowse, Hood and Molyneux is indicative of exactly these kinds of emotional attachments to property.
