Legislation is at the same time a component of the discourse of power and a weapon with which to impose or maintain a given social structure. That is why the study of laws and their materialisation is unavoidable in order to know how a society is structured from the perspective of power. With regards to sexual difference, it becomes an important element through which to know how the legal regulations wanted, not always successfully, to regularise women’s lives, especially emphasising family and inheritance law, and imposing silence, or exclusion, in the law that, as Milagros Rivera states, referring to public law in the Middle Ages, does not affect women.

In the modern period we have to consider both the civil and ecclesiastical legislation. The civil legislation looks after diverse aspects of family law, but especially the patrimonial aspects. Canon law made regulations mainly in relation to marriage. The continuous conflicts between the two tribunals on the subject of family law and the interest of the state in legislating over patrimonial transmission, and therefore in controlling in some way the family community, denotes the interest of the institutions of power in controlling sectors of society that easily escaped them on entering the day-to-day sphere.

When the transmission of wealth is spoken of, generally it is material goods and the transmission of patrimony that is referred to. Under the patriarchal symbolic order, the laws of inheritance do no more than guarantee the functioning of the social structure as established, forming part, at the same time as complementing, the institution of marriage. It is about guaranteeing the transmission of patrimony down a patrilineal line. The rules of inheritance and succession lead directly, as Christine Delphy defined, into patriarchal relationships in which women are prevented from inheriting in equal conditions with regards to their male bothers. Women become necessary elements –because of their reproductive function- but are not beneficiaries of the hereditary transmission. In Catalonia this is materialised through the institution of the inheritor (hereu) or heredamiento that transforms the male unigeniture and primogeniture into universal law. The legal mechanisms give men a privileged position through the marriage contracts and the precedences. Women could become inheritors (pubillas) when the highs and lows of demography were favourable for them, that is, that there were no male brothers in the family, they were the eldest of the sisters or that their male brothers died. The rest had to make do with the amount of the dowry that they would receive on marrying.

However, the transmission of wealth, above all for the families where what was at stake was survival, is not limited to the big material goods nor even just material goods. What is more, in spite of its universalistic pretension of penetration, the law did not reach all aspects of daily life, so that practice often differed from the legal discourse. Whilst it is true that the few rights of women on part of the law were not always respected, it is not less true that they in turn made use of a law, in principle discriminatory for them, for their own benefit. In spite of the difficulties women were an active part of society in all aspects - cultural, social, economic, creating different types of networks and relationships amongst themselves. Some were recognised during the period in which they lived and went beyond the limits placed on their independence.

The transmission of wealth between women can be considered as a form of gine-coherence and it can also be a way of maintaining genealogy alive via the maternal. The transmission of wealth between women can have diverse readings and implies different degrees of solidarity between women.

Firstly, the transmission of wealth between women indicates to us the existence of a relationship that escapes the patriarchal symbolic order and that introduces us, more or less clearly, into the symbolic order of the mother, given that they are relationships that remain outside the limits of the patriarchy.

During the Modern Age, the notarial and legal documents through which we can follow the practice of the transmission of wealth between women or from women, reveal or allow us to intuit the relationships between them, such as between mothers-daughters, between aunts and nieces or between sisters, sister-in-laws and other women relatives, but also between friends or between neighbours. These relationships indicate to us degrees of important complicity between women, who created diverse networks of solidarity and mutual assistance that can be glimpsed both in daily life and in death, and that would contribute to consolidating the role of women as essential elements for the survival of they themselves and their families, giving them the capacity to provide subsistence both in cycles of expansion and in difficult moments and crises.

The relationships between women, symbolic and real, that can be gathered from these documents are generally prominent between mothers and daughters, which would make up a first type of relevant relationship that is easily documented, to which we can add the relationships between women relatives and between women without a kin relationship, which would make up a second and third type of relationship.

From this it is possible to affirm that the transmission of wealth is not just limited to the transmission of inheritance, but also to these practices and/or gifts between women in daily life and to the transmission of such practices and networks of relationships between women, both in the same generations and on an inter-generational level. Women would exercise matronage with their protected ones and sorority with their women neighbours, friends, and sisters.

In the ancien régime, making a will was a usual practice on all social levels. It was about putting the things of life in order after death, and, at the same time, was part of a ritual that surrounded death, impregnating it with a strong religious sentiment.

Mostly, the assets that women possessed were relatively few and were limited to the dowry. This statement was not always explicitly made, but rather can be deduced from the kinds of legacies: small amounts of money, clothes and jewels. Some women will makers did make themselves clear in this sense and assure that the goods that are the object of the will come from their dowry.

On some occasions, however, an allusion is made to the will-makers condition of inheritor. On other occasions the will-makers are rich or possess real estate, even if this only consists of the house that they live in. For example, in the will made by María Eulalia Pi y Jaquet in the year 1796 she states that she has a "dentelle business", that she leaves to one of her daughters, and this does not seem to represent the greater part of her assets, given that the legacy is not made to the one that she names as the inheritor.

Women tended to make wills as widows from which data and other we can deduce that they enjoyed a greater freedom to make wills than other women, above all the married ones, on having freed themselves from the marital tutelage.

One of the unusual things that can be observed on beginning to read wills made by women is the apparition of other women as testamentary executrix, generally daughters, daughters-in-law, or other women relatives. The frequency of women’s apparition as executrix is higher in the wishes of more recent, especially when the noble women make wills.

In spite of the fact that the laws, custom, superstition and other causes induced and/or obliged women to follow the norms that discriminated against them, there often existed cracks through which the norm was violated or twisted. Women repeatedly tried to get past the norms. In the wills made by women during the Modern Age, when the mothers make use of their matria potestad and name a woman as inheritor, most of these are daughters of the maker of the will, who are named as inheritors because of a lack of male children, but there are notable exceptions where they decide not to follow the patriarchal rules of succession and the inheriting daughter does have male brothers. On occasions the women will-makers name their sons and daughters as inheritors in equal parts, and on others the son receives a third of the goods and the daughter two-thirds.

But where the specificities of the wills made by women are most noticeable is in the legacies. Women, even when they followed established norms when it came to making their will, always had a space to remember other women. Here we can see the great dispersion of the few goods that women had in favour of other women, direct and indirect relatives, such as aunts, sisters, nieces..., and also in favour of other women without bonds of kin. These legacies are generally humble objects, of little value, but which may have had a key strategic importance in the face of survival. They reinforce relationships of kin that are real and fictitious; in reality, that are networks of feminine solidarity, whose main objective was to ensure the survival of women and their families.

Margarita Call y Pedrals signs her will before a notary in Barcelona, 20th August 1781, disposing of her assets and those of her husband, who on dying gave her such a faculty in his will – dated 1769. In the said will, Margarita makes use of the matria potestad and decides to make a sharing out in equal parts of the inheritance between her son Esteve and her maiden daughter, Teresa. The will-maker has another daughter to whom she makes a legacy of 25 pounds as a supplement of legítima and who is constituted as an inheritor with her sister and brother but only for the said amount, since, according to Margarita, her part was already given to her as a dowry when she married. What is more, Margarita gives Teresa another legacy, made up of clothes and an image of Our Lady of Carmen. This is an act of feminine authority in which Margarita violates the prevailing guidelines of the patriarchal laws of succession in benefit of her daughters, and particularly her daughter Teresa.

The patriarchal laws appear, in theory, as an obstacle to feminine freedom. The need to adapt to the values marked out by the codes of honour would get mixed up with the fact that these and other norms would never obtain the desired success and would always find themselves with a more or less patent or diffuse resistance. The masculine laws and codes of honour would attempt to delineate, for the women in modern Spain, their margins for action, margins that would impose limitations on the women’s capacity to act in different areas: in the legal area, through the impossibility of possessing a complete legal personality; in the area of work, closing women’s tasks into some concrete spaces and not giving them social recognition; in the public sphere, by denying them the use of the word and of writing, etc.

However, the barriers imposed would often be got over. The ambiguity in the borders or boundaries that have limited throughout history what has been considered honourable or not, facilitated the configuration of a dividing line which was sufficiently wide, and at the same time allowed for a margin to manoeuvre that women used for their personal development and/or their own desire. Women were capable of using a discriminatory legal system for their own benefit. Women took from patriarchal law what was of interest to them for their projects. For example, they remained as usufructuaries after having married again, or even having done so before the year of mourning had passed or keeping themselves in a de facto separation whilst a sentence that might never arrive was to be produced – in fact the processes of marriage separation constituted a strategy for women with the objective of escaping from the marital tutelage and obtaining greater independence.

The civil processes of the Royal Audience shows the complexity of the relationships between women and between them and the law, on giving a voice to many women who could not appear in other kinds of legal documents. In these processes women show in great part their desires, their bonds with other women, their relationships of love and non-love, sometimes the bond between classes.

For younger secondary school students:

Read the translation or a part of it previously chosen by the teacher. Point out the type of relationships between women that are given in the text and look for similarities in the families and frameworks of the neighbourhood of each pupil.

For older school students or first year university students:

Compare the text with a will signed by a man, particularly if the latter is an inheritor. In order to do so, go to the local archives or to the archive of protocols to choose a text of the same period.