Women, marital status and participation in Stockholm´s real estate market 1730–1850

This article examines women’s participation in Stockholm’s urban real estate market between 1730 and 1850 and assesses how property bought and sold by women functioned within household economies under formal legal constraints. It combines a new database of all legally registered real estate transactions recorded every five years, comprising 3,308 sales involving 5,464 individuals and measures how long women owned the property and how they eventually disposed of it. The quantitative results are brought into dialogue with qualitative case studies that trace wives and spinsters across censuses and property registers to further investigate how they used the property for economic purposes. The study finds that women appear in more than half of all transactions, most often as sellers, while they are far less visible as buyers. Widows dominate as independent market actors, but spinsters become increasingly prominent over time despite formal guardianship. While average holding times do not differ significantly among spinsters, widows, and wives, spinsters more often than other groups retained their property until death. The case studies show that women used property to generate rental incomes, as collateral for credit, and for commercial activities, and that juridical restrictions shaped but not prevented women´s economic practice in early modern Stockholm.