Silk Sails by Calvin Evans Read Free Book Online

baking went into this container. My mother-in-law loaned such money to young people going away to find work and was always repaid. These small earnings in families often made the difference between survival and poverty. A recently published book,
Egg Money Quilts
by Eleanor Burns, pays tribute to three of the author’s female forebears and their industry and initiative in using “egg money” to meet family needs.
    Women with money bought ships and shares in ships, but they also became mortgagees, securing loans for others to buy ships and charging interest to make a profit. The fact, for example, that women were sometimes designated “co-partners in trade” emphasizes the reality that women had money, made money and shared in the profits from fishing and trading ventures.
Women and Property
    It would be appropriate at this point to consider the law and practices that governed women’s inheritance of property, particularly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There appears to have been some erosion of rights in practice from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which is ironic in view of the fact that it was a British queen, not a king, who ruled through much of the period under study.
    In his thesis,
Economic and Social Relations of Production on the North-East Coast of Newfoundland, with special reference to Conception Bay, 1785-1855
, Sean Cadigan quotes some examples which seem to reflect a pessimistic view of how women actually fared in cases where they inherited property from their husbands. He writes: “Widows usually inherited little property from their husbands’ estates. Those who did, like Mary Sheppard in 1788, were not allowed to alienate what little women did inherit from the husband’s patriarchal line.” It is true that many husbands’ wills tended to disinherit the wife from the estate in the event that she remarried, but perhaps because of the preeminence of the family as an economic unit and the wish to guarantee that it would remain so in law; also, if the wife remarried, she joined another economic unit which might in some cases have been in competition with her children’s. I would interpret differently some of the examples Cadigan gives because many widows seem to have been adversely affected by contentious, quarrelsome sons and stepsons or sons born of other marriages. Even in Mary Sheppard’scase, she was obligated only to pass on her late husband’s “goods” to her son Adam after she died, but Adam died before she did, so “the watch and feather bed,” which Adam had apparently taken, were to be returned to Mary and “the said Adam’s Heirs to pay the sum of 6 pounds to said Petitioner for the use of what goods he enjoyed during his Life and which belonged to his Mother…”
    The example of Ann Mugford, wife of the deceased Robert Mugford, planter at Port de Grave, was a case in which Ann violated the terms of her husband’s will, which stated that she had inherited his property for her natural life and then it was to pass to their eldest daughter Frances. Before her death in 1813, Ann Mugford had sold the property to John Walsh, and in 1817, Nicholas Newell, a planter in St. John’s, petitioned the court to recover the property since he was married to Frances. The Chief Justice acceded to this request.
    There is no doubt that the rules governing inherited property were patriarchal, but in actual fact, when good relationships existed between the widow and her children (as was usual), the family as an economic unit survived and flourished and the widow often continued to play a leadership role in guiding the family fortunes. In fact, Cadigan pays tribute to women “who could take on important economic roles as estate managers and temporary household heads throughout the Anglo-American world in this period,” and he acknowledges that women like Jane Cook of Harbour Grace