8 - State and estate

Summary

So that one knows how to proceed against prodigals and wastrels, we do ordain and establish that against whoever squanders his property unprofitably … at the complaint and appeal of friends and relations of the wastrel, or of his wife, … as soon as enough evidence for such complaint is demonstrated … the administration of his goods and chattels shall be taken away from him.

- 2. Landrecht, 1567

Discussion between husbands and wives about common and conflicting goals, the nature and pace of work, or shares in what they produce takes place within concrete institutional arrangements. We have seen how rights to ownership in land and other forms of property in Neckarhausen were sorted out, but there were other kinds of rights which we also have to examine. Ownership by itself does not tell us about conditions of management, use, or alienability, nor does it tell us how relations between husbands and wives were structured by the actions of state officials in practice. The capacity to own property, for example, was not differentiated by sex, but the ability to manage or sell it was. Such a situation is not surprising, but it would be far too simplistic to classify it under a heading such as “patriarchy.” Throughout the period under study, the husband under Württemberg law was the administrator of the family property “mass.” But there were guarantees to protect wives, which hemmed husbands in and made them continually responsible to the public and to official observation and intervention. Since the institutions which protected women changed over the period, the different strategies which husbands and wives pursued cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the general principles and main turning points.