Did Freer Markets Free Women? Family Capital, Marital Property, and Economic Development in South Carolina, 1750-1860

Even as banks proliferated during the nineteenth century, the family remained a critical source of wealth and marriage a key mechanism for its transfer, blurring the separation between family and business. This paper mines a rich series of documents to investigate one aspect of the “gendered business” of family: how families adapted their marital property management strategies in response to economic development. It focuses on South Carolina’s marriage settlements (prenuptial agreements that created trust estates), which are uniquely useful because, unlike in other states, they are filed as a separate series and thus easy to identify – thus permitting scholars to track patterns of wealth management over time.

This paper uses statistical analysis of a randomly generated sample to quantify how families modified the contents of agreements while also examining in what ways women could access their trust property. It finds that families responded to economic change, decreasing inclusion of personal property while incorporating investments into these wealth “portfolios.” Despite changes, enslaved people remained a core asset that families protected, reinforcing recent works that demonstrate that slavery and capitalism were compatible. Furthermore, this analysis shows that economic progressivism did not advance women’s empowerment – indeed, economic responsiveness indicated by stockholding negatively correlates with granting women control over the trust property. These findings further complicate the notion of capitalism as liberating by revealing how it reinforced rather than eroded women’s subordination in marriage, contributing to larger debates, both scholarly and activist, regarding how the “free” market has historically reinforced gender inequality.