Guardianship over women in medieval Flanders: a reappraisal

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1998 by Ellen E. Kittell

Family

Both husband and wife had, as we have seen, the capacity to manage and to administer marital property. This capacity may well have emerged out of the fact that in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Flanders the family was embedded in the spousal unit and not in paternity. In many parts of Europe, particularly but not exclusively in those influenced by Roman law, the father was socially and legally identified as the essential constitutive element of the family: spousal and parental authority were fundamentally synonymous with paternal authority. In some regions familial identity inhered in the father to such an extent that his death required the splitting up of the property;(94) in certain regions, such as Normandy, and among certain classes, notably the feudal elite, such partition extended even to the confiding of surviving members of the family group to the care of other groups.(95) Although in parts of medieval Europe widows might carry on the work of their deceased spouses, generally speaking, a family without a father, then as now, was thought to be incomplete and somehow crippled. "Paternity" defined the family, governing relations between husband and wife, demarcating parenthood and determining the position of bastards.

The defining of a woman as someone's wife or daughter or widow was commonplace in Flanders; the Flemish cultural area was certainly no stranger to patriarchy. But there were some telling variations. In Douai, for example, custom privileged the marital unit; spouses rather than children were seen as the natural heirs.(96) When it came to rights of inheritance, a married women was therefore her husband's equal. A man could not be a father without a child, and Douai's custom, by preferring the spouse over the child, diminished the significance of this status. The status of "married," in fact, seems to have been of greater significance than that of "father."(97) Since patriarchy by definition must constrain female sexuality within marriage in order to protect paternity, the diminution in the importance of fatherhood may well have had the consequence of raising the relative status of women within marriage.

A similar situation seems to have existed in Ghent. Dowries were commonly given in many parts of Europe, in part to make up for the automatic exclusion of women from succession to the patrimony. As the discussion of marital property in the section above indicates, women were not routinely so excluded in Flanders. One of the reasons for this, as Marianne Danneel has crisply demonstrated, is that girls and boys were equally linked in marriage. As a result, as she states, "[i]t was thus not necessary to give a girl a dowry in compensation for her exclusion by the law of inheritance."(98) When it came to inheritance of the community of goods, the widow's right was as great as the widower's.(99)

Relative economic parity is replicated in the domain of parenthood. Flemish custom up to the sixteenth century usually dictated that children be subject to the authority of both of their parents.(100) When one died, the other, regardless of sex, usually was expected to take over the guardianship of any minor children; a child was considered to be an orphan regardless of which parent had died.(101) The absence of either of the parents, not just of the father, therefore, was considered to be a disadvantage. The customary law or keure of Ghent in 1297 appears to assume that the voogd (the guardian responsible for the estate of minor children, usually appointed by the city) was to be the surviving parent, father or mother, and ordains that the voogd should keep annual accounts of that property.(102) This suggests that mother and father were considered more or less equal in terms not only of their duty, but also of their capacity to take care of their children. If women themselves automatically had guardians, how could they function as guardians for their children?