These kinds of colleges have historically been sites for the transmission of valuable cultural capital, disguised as leafy playgrounds and Arcadian oases, and admission has always come with the relative guarantee of both forthcoming financial and social benefit. The question of admissions has, therefore, been taken seriously by administrators and reformers seeking equity in education, and debates have taken place in both trustee meetings and courtrooms.

What the debates have made clear, what was perhaps always clear, is that college admissions is fundamentally about inheritance. On the one hand, legacy admissions have always been a blatant statement of inherited privilege. On the other hand, exclusion from college also represents a deep legacy of dispossession that generations of marginalized, particularly Black and Indigenous families, have carried. In both cases, historical patterns of inheritance predominate, shaping educational and wealth gaps.

The legacy system is high-wealth inheritance turned into an admissions slot.

Although legacy admissions may sound like a very old tradition, they only began in the 1920s. Before then, there was no real need for any preferential treatment because no one applied other than white, Christian men from “good” families. By the 1920s, however, elite schools were confronted with an influx of applicants who didn’t fit the traditional mold.

In particular, the Ivy League schools faced a rising number of highly qualified Jewish applicants who they were loathe to admit. The colleges instituted informal quotas for Jewish students and, in service of filtering candidates, began using non-academic factors like alumni interviews while they also debuted legacy admissions. By the 1930s, nearly a third of Yale undergraduates were the children of men who had graduated from Yale. The other Ivies looked much the same. Admissions had become an inheritance game.

Jewish quotas were ultimately eliminated, Black and brown students joined the ranks of admitted students, and women were even admitted as the staunchly male Ivies started to slowly change their policies in the 1960s and 1970s. But legacy admissions have remained. Currently, in the Ivy League, about 10 to 15 percent of students are legacies. These days, the sorting rationale is kept quiet and colleges glorify the “diversity” that legacy admits bring.1

The financial story is, however, hard to ignore as institutional reasoning. Legacy admissions mean students who are less likely to need financial aid, students whose parents are also usually donors, and students who are more likely to give upon graduation. Legacy admissions are a part of the donor pipeline that is, in turn, part of the circulation of inherited wealth. Admissions slots have been transformed into inherited assets, and family legacies have transformed into inherited funds for the schools. Legacy admissions are dynasty trusts for cultural capital, with capital provided by the families and management services by the institutions.

The legal attempt to rewrite legacies of dispossession.

In a different part of the admissions file, legacies also exist. These students share a legacy of dispossession having been repeatedly and systematically denied entry into the college cloisters. It’s an inheritance, just a different kind, and a stark reminder of how both wealth and poverty, inclusion and exclusion, transfer through the generations.

There have been attempts to remediate this unequal legacy and progress has been made. The law has, however, steadfastly refused to see the problem in terms of inheritance and address it as such. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the U.S. Supreme Court refused to uphold quotas based on race and instead guided colleges and universities to use race as a factor. In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote:

It is because of a legacy of unequal treatment that we now must permit the institutions of this society to give consideration to race in making decisions about who will hold the positions of influence, affluence, and prestige in America.

The Supreme Court was unwilling, however, to materially rewrite this legacy. Then, in 2023, the law went from limited acknowledgment to total foreclosure. The Court, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), completely gutted the ability of admissions offices to use race as even one factor among many, thereby eliminating the primary mechanism explicitly designed to counteract inherited disadvantage. All while leaving untouched the mechanism that directly rewarded inherited advantage.

The trend with schools takes a different turn.

Despite the Supreme Court’s refusal to support a framework designed to equalize educational inheritances, schools have been taking initiative in eliminating legacy admission on their own. Some schools like MIT have never had legacy admissions. Others like Johns Hopkins and Amherst have stopped the practice, and last year only 24% of four-year colleges still considered legacy status, down from 49% in 2015. What’s more, five states (California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, and Virginia) have banned legacy preferences at public universities,

Nevertheless, some schools persist. Notably, Stanford has stated that they will continue to use legacy status in admissions decision despite the fact of California’s ban. What this means is that Stanford has made the decision to lose state-grant funding rather than terminate the legacy system. Donor funding, their institution’s inheritance, was too difficult to give up.

Ultimately, legacy admissions and race-conscious admissions have never been two separate questions. They have always been two sides of the same question, namely what do we do about inheritance. And law’s answer, at least for now, has been to keep both historical forms of inheritance squarely in place. This means letting legacies of both privilege and poverty carry over and letting dynasties build. Elite families can continue to build dynasties that keep wealth moving forward, across generations. Colleges and universities can also build dynasties that keep wealth moving forward, across generations. And these two forms of dynasties remain intertwined with one another, in a tangle of accumulating profit.

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click the book cover). If you order through the Press you can get 30% off using the code UCPSAVE30.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest updates and more posts like this one!

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The hidden curriculum, as scholars describe it, “represents insider knowledge” and perpetuates “access and achievement gaps for those not in the know.” It is about the unwritten rules and the unacknowledged prerequisites for academic success. It is knowing you should go to office hours, join a study group, or do a particular extracurricular program. That’s one side of it, and students from certain backgrounds are well-versed in this curriculum while others are not.

Information and transparency are not enough, however, to solve the inequalities that the hidden curriculum creates because there is a second side to the hidden curriculum: the cost of belonging. One view of the hidden curriculum teaches us that unwritten rules create unequal opportunities. This second view teaches us that even with equal knowledge of the rules, not everyone can access what the hidden curriculum offers because belonging is expensive.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, offers a trenchant perspective on the hidden curriculum and how the two different perspectives are co-constitutive. The novel takes place at Hampden College, a small liberal arts college: “Student body, five hundred. Co-ed. Progressive. Specializing in the liberal arts. Highly selective.” (Yes, it’s Bennington.) Richard Papen, the narrator, has gotten there because of his good grades, a propensity for Greek, and his self-professed “morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

Class One: affording opportunity and curating the right identity.

From the first pages of the novel we know that Richard is not a typical Hampden student. He is from Plano, California, his father runs a gas station, and his mother is a factory worker. His family’s financial circumstances mean he cannot go to Hampden without financial aid. To get financial aid, however, he must visit the campus for an interview:

When could I fly to Vermont? I could not afford to fly to Vermont, and I wrote and told him so. Another wait, another letter. The college would reimburse me for my travel expenses if their scholarship offer was accepted.

The trip comes off somehow, Richard is accepted with aid, and he packs his bags for Vermont. Richard recognizes that Hampden is a new beginning and he immediately both transforms his history and identity. As a result, his California childhood becomes one “full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents.” This is the version of a California student, he thinks, that will resonate with people on a campus that is filled with apple trees, playing fields, and “groups of red-cheeked girls playing soccer, ponytails flying.” Aware that admission is not enough, this is his attempt at belonging.

Class Two: social connections and the failure of formal channels.

Once he has settled in, Richard tries to register for classes and another obstacle arises. He wants to take Greek, the subject that got him to Hampden and the one he loves, but his advisor tells him the class is not open to the general student body.2 His advisor explains:

I don’t know why they continue to list his courses in the general catalogue—it’s misleading, every year there is confusion about it—because, practically speaking, the classes are closed. I am told that to study with him one must have read the right things, hold similar views. It has happened repeatedly that he has turned away students such as yourself who have done prior work in classics.

Determined, Richard goes in search of the professor’s office, which proves to be difficult since it is hidden in an ivy-covered building on the edge of campus with no visible signage. Moreover, when he finally finds the office and knocks on the door, the professor gets rid of him as quickly as possible. Richard’s understanding of the hidden curriculum takes him from the registrar’s office to the professor’s door, but his self-advocacy is not enough.

Richard does finally get into the class, but it is because he inadvertently impresses the students who are already enrolled. They persuade the professor and, magically, Richard is in. These students are everything that Richard is not, people who have “English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France.” The twins come from an old, established family in Virginia, giving off the impression of old-school Southern wealth. Francis comes from an immensely rich Boston family and owns the country estate where the group goes for their weekend bacchanals. Henry has a vast trust fund set up for him by his family in St. Louis. Even Edmund (nicknamed “Bunny”), the least wealthy of them, exudes “sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers.” Social connections are the driver of Richard’s success.

Class Three: when being broke has real consequences.

Once Richard has been admitted into the class and adopted into the group, small things still prevent the hidden curriculum from being the same for everyone. Richard can’t always go off campus to study with them because he is reluctant to eat outside of the dining hall. Or because his car breaks down. Or because he can’t afford the taxis they suggest. Richard works a campus job to get the spending money they all get from their parents and he has to log hours in a lab.

The most blatant example of Richard’s different financial positioning is winter break. With the dorms closed, Richard has nowhere to go and no money for rent. He also needs to make money:

But there was the question of money. For the months until school began I would have to have a job. I needed money if I wanted to come back in the spring, and I couldn’t very well work if I was gallivanting around…

Richard takes a job working for the musician in town in exchange for lodging, which turns out to be unheated. He camps out in the university buildings as much as possible, writing cheerful letters to his friends. But the cold and snow are unrelenting and Richard ends up having to be hospitalized, creating another bill that Henry pays for him. Another debt, not because the curriculum wasn’t clear but because it was unaffordable.

Extra Credit: wealth performance, money hazing, and the truth of Bunny’s behavior.

For the most part, Richard’s friends politely ignore his financial need, pretending that they’re all having the same college experience, reading the same secret syllabus, despite the fact they are decidedly not. The only direct aggression toward Richard comes from Bunny, when he invites Richard to lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town, a place with white tablecloths and a deep wine list.

Without anything appropriate to wear, Richard borrows a jacket from the college’s costume department: “The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful—old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green—a little loose, but it fit all right.” The moment that Bunny sees the jacket, he calls Richard out: “‘Lovely piece,’ he said importantly. ‘Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.’”

Bunny continues through lunch, talking about the Polo Lounge and the Oak Bar, asking Richard about vacationing in Jamaica and the source of his family money. The horrors of the lunch for Richard, however, are capped off at the end, after cocktails, champagne, and brandy, when Bunny reveals that he doesn’t have his wallet and that Richard needs to pay.

When it becomes clear that Richard can’t pay, Bunny calls Henry, who comes down to the restaurant and pays the check. It is a hazing gone wrong, a failure for both of them, but Bunny’s behavior highlights the ways in which more vulnerable students can be offered opportunity and then set up for failure and debt, sometimes cruelly so.

Bunny is the only one to make the accusation, ask questions, and ultimately attempt to undo Richard’s inclusion in the group. Bunny’s behavior is a brutal flash of honesty about the fact that they all have different positioning to the hidden curriculum. That honesty is the exception, not the rule. The hidden curriculum operates as intended, in silence, just like the ledger of expenses.

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click the book cover). If you order through the Press you can get 30% off using the code UCPSAVE30.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest updates and more posts like this one!

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I’ve been to a wedding. I bet you have too.

You can dress up a wedding however you want, buying Vera Wang or leaning into your mother’s vintage dress. You can pick signature colors (blush and bashful?). And you can extol the joys of love and intimacy all you want. But the fact remains that a legal wedding - the act of getting married - is about money. Marriage is a legal relationship that works to organize family money, change an individual’s property rights, and transfer money through generations. And the wedding is the room where it happens.

Weddings are markers of a change in property rights and windows into how family money operates. Take two different weddings. One couple has a destination wedding, a huge guest list, a check from their parents, and a prenup that protects the family money on one or both sides. Another couple funds the wedding on their own and goes into credit card debt. Same white dress, same pronouncement, same marriage license. But one couple started married life by capitalizing on and protecting family wealth, the other began with a debt spiral.

Something old: dowries, marriage settlements, and generational planning.
Historically, for those families with wealth to protect, there was no attempt to hide the fact that marriage and money were intimately connected. Bridal dowries were a subject of intense speculation and negotiations over marriage settlements could be marathon events that lasted for days, with lawyers quibbling over allowances and land rights. Weddings were akin to corporate mergers, with the paperwork to prove it. Women with family money had to be protected with trusts, since they lost most of their property rights upon marriage. And women without money had to get married in order to be economically secure. They didn’t call it the marriage market for nothing.

Something new: the wedding as a driver for financial planning.
Things are different now. Wedding dresses no longer involve bustles or stays, no one serves aspic, and married women even get to keep their property after marriage. Nevertheless, the wedding is still a moment of financial contracting and anxiety. Instead of marriage settlements, we now have prenups; and instead of families protecting their wealth from the new spouse through the use of trusts, we now have, well, families protecting their wealth from the new spouse through the use of trusts.

The big change, really, is the advent of divorce and the prospect of family wealth loss through judicial settlements that are both unplanned by and unpalatable to the family. This is where prenups come in as do premarital trusts. Having both forms of protection is what the lawyers call the “belt and suspenders” approach. And really, as some of the trust marketers will tell you, creating a trust is more romantic because you don’t have to tell your future spouse what you’re doing if you don’t want to.

Something borrowed and something blue: the taking on of aspirational debt.
For other couples, weddings are also about money, but the question is how to come up with the money to afford the wedding. The price of an average wedding creeps up every year, and this year the average was $35,000. The debt that couples take on climbs alongside the cost.

Traditionally, in the heteronormative world, the bride’s parents pay, and weddings have long been an event made possible through parental giving. However, an increasing number of couples are funding their own weddings, and certainly not all couples have parents with the deep pockets to afford the lavish flower arrangements or the top-of-the-line catering.

As has written, in a great post about weddings:

What we can say is this: for the first-generation couple, a wedding, whatever they decide to spend, is taking money out of a shallower pool, with fewer parental resources in reserve, and more of the financial planning done without a family template to follow.

Some people use GoFundMe to raise money for weddings and the platform even features a formal integration with The Knot Registry. But the majority of these self-funding couples report going into some form of debt, on average around $10,000. Couples, trying to replicate the spectacular wedding they posted across social media platforms and sold by the behemoth of a wedding industry, swipe their credit card. These couples aren’t just borrowing money for an event, they’re borrowing a class performance they can’t necessarily sustain past the reception. Their something borrowed, both money and social identity, turn into something blue.

And a sixpence in her shoe: the forgotten part of the saying.
This is the line everyone leaves out, and very few people even recognize it as part of the rhyme (although the makers of these shoes certainly know it). In the early-modern period, the sixpence was a gift from the father, or head of household, to the bride, symbolizing prosperity and the couple’s good financial health. In later years, the coin was merely seen as a sign of good luck. But this hidden symbol of wealth sends an enduring message. It highlights what we knew all along: it’s about the money.

Something old: the marriage settlement. Something new: the prenup. Something borrowed: the debt. Something blue: what the debt becomes. And the sixpence, the money that was always there, holding everything up from underneath.

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click the book cover). If you order through the Press you can get 30% off using the code UCPSAVE30.

And if you haven’t already, subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest updates and more posts like this one!

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Access to this kind of leisure has diverged, however, over time. And while the rich have created and sustained luxury real estate and wellness industries to serve them, those with fewer resources have seen their vacation days dwindle along with their access to health and leisure.

Taking the waters and buying the land.

Seaside and spa vacations for the rich began with medical advice and became social geography. Towns like Bath, Spa (in Belgium), and Saratoga Springs were all named for their main industry and became staple locations in the elite social calendar. Bath had a season just like London did, and Saratoga provided the setting for New York bankers and their families to socialize during the summer months. Guests spent hours not only taking the waters but also strolling along manicured lawns, grand verandas, and artificial lakes where they could see and be seen.

To facilitate both health and social activity, families bought houses in these “watering holes” and “sea bathing” spots, which became sites of property power. Developers invested in luxury hotels and private individuals built stately homes along the coastline. In the United States, gilded-age industrialists from Newport, Rhode Island, to Newport Beach, California, transformed wild or agricultural shorelines into exclusive enclaves, driving up demand, subdividing large tracts of ranch or farmlan, and shifting land tenure from common use to high-value private ownership.1 Seaside resorts and spa towns were arenas for conspicuous land consumption.

The origins of luxury wellness culture.

Wellness became wealth through property. Wellness also became wealth through culture, as spas and sea bathing became an experience to be purchased and performed: the conspicuous consumption of health. By the late 19th century, a vast network of over 2,000 spa and seaside resorts emerged across the United States, a collection of grand architectural statements inspired by European-style luxury. In these resorts, the concept of wellness shifted from baseline physical necessity to luxury commodity.

Predictably, time by the sea was also a highly gendered phenomenon. Women and children went for the summer while husbands stayed in the city, reuniting with their families on the weekend. In addition, women were sent to the seaside or the sanatorium on their own by doctors who prescribed a rest cure to women suffering from the supposed ailment of hysteria or from other “female” maladies such as postpartum depression or nervous exhaustion. While packaged as therapeutic getaways, these prescriptions often functioned as a form of medicalized captivity and social control, isolating women, stripping them of autonomy, and forcing them to conform to strict patriarchal expectations.

Wakes week and the promise of the boardwalk.

In the meantime, while the English elite was gathering in Bath, Blackpool was the center of seaside vacations for working-class families because of its proximity to neighboring industrial and manufacturing towns. This was especially true once railway travel made the journey easier starting in 1846. Industrial towns across England took their “Wakes Week” or vacations in the summer months, staggering them to control the influx of people into Blackpool and timing them to coincide with maintenance shutdowns in the factories. None of the workers had paid time off, so families made their vacations possible through weekly deposits during the year into local “Wakes Saving” or “Going-Off” clubs. These vacations represented the culmination of hard work and savings, but they also offered working-class families the prospect of a week of leisure, living like the rich.

Coney Island, in the United States, offered a similar kind of space. The original geography of Coney Island was segmented by class. But when the public boardwalk was opened in 1923, it brought increased access to the coastline and offered working-class families a seaside destination. Cheap rail travel and trolley lines allowed working-class families to escape dark, poorly ventilated New York City tenements and benefit from the bracing sea air. Once again, paid time off was rare, so most workers chose to take their families to Coney Island for one-day outings on Sundays.

The curative and cultural programming of Health Homes.

In the name of health, charitable organizations, like the Brooklyn Children’s Aid Society, also established seaside Health Homes to treat sick infants from the poverty-stricken areas. These homes gave poor mothers and their children clean beds, nutritious food, and a break from grueling factory or domestic labor, allowing them to rest and be restored to health. The cure came, however, with costs and conditions. Non-white mothers were largely shut out of these seaside health retreats entirely due to segregation policies. For mothers who were admitted, the Health Homes were sites of social control and “Americanization.” Instructors in the Homes dismissed immigrant cultures and cuisines as unhealthy and taught the mothers how to prepare the correct forms of food for their children and how to properly care for them. Mothers also were required to put their sick or premature infants on display in a boardwalk sideshow, where their families were treated as public spectacles.

The decline of the worker’s holiday.

While both the elite and the working class may have started out taking to the seaside as a health measure, only one group stayed. In Britain, the mill towns started closing for good in the 1960s and 70s. When the factories shut down, the traditions tethered to them shut down as well. Coney Island followed a similar arc and the period after World War II was one of neglect and demolition for some of the great amusement parks. The “people’s beach” at Coney Island, which had drawn half a million visitors on a single weekend, was hollowed out while the Hamptons became some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

Time off and vacation pay continued to present obstacles as well. While labor organizers and progressive reformers obtained certain wins, paid time off, at least in the United States, was always been without federal guarantee and highly variable in its availability. Even recently, in 2025, twenty-three percent of all American workers took zero days off because of heavy workloads and unsupportive employers. precarious. And even workers who have paid time off don’t necessarily use it: 62 percent let a third of their vacation days go unused, because of anxieties over precarious employment. While one group’s cure has become luxury real estate and a trillion-dollar wellness industry, the other group has lost even the weekend retreat.

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click on the book cover) and don’t forget to subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest posts!

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This August, in honor of summer vacation, Inheriting Inequality is turning its focus to leisure and how it intersects with families and their money. The month’s theme starts today with a post on the family vacation and why family sits at the center of the leisure economy on both ends of the wealth spectrum.

Family money, whether you have a little or a lot, determines location.

Whether you are on the high-wealth end of the spectrum or its opposite, family money often determines where you go on summer vacation. For families with money, there are family properties that form a part of family tradition when it comes to vacationing. A compound in Maine, a house in Aspen, real estate in the Cotswolds or the south of France. Vacation takes place in trust-held properties, where generations return year after year. This kind of vacation is free and easy, but it also plays a major role in creating family identity and history.

For families without much money to spend on vacation, family properties also determine location. In this case, however, vacation is all about the relative’s couch, the free lodging, the drive to see grandparents and stay with them. This kind of vacation is also free and easy. And it also plays a major role in creating family identity and history. Family and family money are never incidental to vacation, they are the mechanisms that make vacation possible at every income level. It’s just that the view out the window is completely different depending on the family.

Does your vacation depend on wealth accumulation or depletion?

Despite the superficial differences between these two kinds of family vacations - a villa on the Mediterranean versus the waterpark down the street from grandma’s house - both forms can be fantastic. Money certainly does not guarantee a great time, nor does the lack of it necessarily impose any obstacles to having a terrific and memorable vacation. The more meaningful difference is how family money operates underneath the different vacation home facades. The two different kinds of vacations run on two parallel but completely divergent household financing systems.

High-wealth vacations run on family money and sit atop the accumulation of it. Vacation homes in trust, gifted property, appreciating real estate, generational capital. These are the building blocks of high-wealth vacations and they don’t require anyone to save up. Instead they let families enjoy assets that are actively building more wealth, through appreciation and tax savings, while the family has breakfast or spends the day by the pool.

Working-class vacations run on family savings: income that has been squirreled away and credit card debt that has been incurred. Vacation planning requires budgeting and a trail of small decisions (where to stop for gas, whether the hotel breakfast is included, what snacks to bring in the car). Vacation is never done on the back of accumulating wealth; instead vacation depletes family wealth and may even add new debt.2 This difference gets at a key function of the leisure class: they can afford time away because their assets work for them. They own capital instead of working for it.

Family vacation reveals other forms of inequality too.

The family vacation provide a window into unequal access to leisure and economic opportunities. In this respect, summer travel reveals how inequality between families plays out away from home. Family vacation also provides a window into other, related forms of inequality that inhere in the family structure, relating to who does the work to make family vacation possible.

On the high-wealth end, family vacation is often made possible by the labor of other families, the ones who live locally and get paid to ensure that the upscale family vacation goes smoothly. The nannies who are hired for childcare, the cleaning staff who keep the homes spotless, the landscapers who tend to the grounds, and the caterers who put together picnic baskets and cocktail parties. In this way, family vacation highlights the vastly varying economic vistas that can be found at different locations on the wealth spectrum. Vacation for some is labor for others, and historical patterns with respect to class, race, and gender repeat themselves.

For example, on the other end of the wealth spectrum, the work of family vacation - the care work and household labor done by professional staff in the high-wealth context - often falls to women in the family. Women do the majority of the vacation planning, meal preparation, and childcare during travel. Similarly, they do unpaid hosting, cooking for guests, and childcare when visitors come to their houses. All the things that make these road trips and visits to the relatives successful are done without compensation, which heightens intra-family inequality.

Moreover, this kind of gender inequality on summer vacation is not limited to families at one point on the wealth spectrum. Gender-coded roles and hierarchies pertain in the high-wealth world as well. Women are typically the ones who book the plane tickets and make restaurant reservations. They are the ones who manage the staff, and make sure that activities are planned. Amplifying the inequality in these high-wealth scenarios, while the women are often the ones doing the managing and administrative work of family vacation, they are less frequently the ones listed on the property deed or the inheritance documents. Unpaid labor is accompanied by the unequal distribution of family assets.

*****

Vacation doesn’t escape the inequalities of ordinary life. It just relocates them to a lovelier landscape: a beach, a mountain, an island reachable only by ferry. The hierarchy inside the family, who holds the deed and who does the dishes, and the hierarchy between families, who vacations and who serves, are the same. The architecture of family inequality doesn’t change. Ultimately, that may be the clearest thing family vacation tells us about family money: not how much a family has, but who inside and around that family is allowed to actually stop working while everyone else calls it summer.

What does summer vacation bring up for you? Any memorable vacations or memories of vacation being a lot more work than it should have been?

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click on the book cover) and don’t forget to subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest posts!

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The catch? Someone always has to be watching.

From its inception, surveillance was the name of the game for the credit reporting industry, reliant on the gathering of highly personal information in order to function. That’s the part of the story we’re looking at today: how this apparatus became so thoroughly baked into our economic system that we stopped noticing it was there.

The Real Neighborhood Watch.

In the United States, before the Revolution, credit usage in the colonies was widespread, generally informal, and extended based on personal knowledge of the borrower in question. What your neighbors said about you mattered. Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1748 in his Advice to a Young Tradesman:

The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by the creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at the billiard-table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day.

Lenders only had to go into the tavern or ask some questions at a dinner party to determine what kind of credit risk someone presented. Everyone knew if you were industrious or idle, trustworthy or trouble. Creditworthiness, from the very beginning, was a moral audit dressed up as a financial one. Those who had a reputation for hard work and honesty got credit. Those who drank all day, showed up late to work, or never repaid a debt did not.

The Birth of an Industry and the Growth of a Machine.

As populations grew and communities were no longer as tight-knit as they had once been, the job of assessing individuals for credit became increasingly difficult. This need for more centralized information became an opportunity for the enterprising Lewis Tappan, who debuted the first credit reporting agency in 1841. Due to the private nature of the data collected, Tappan felt compelled to reassure people that the system was good, proclaiming far and wide: “It is not a system of espionage.” Despite this reassurance, Tappan’s system and the systems of those who followed him in the industry “constituted an elaborate system of mass surveillance.”1 That these reports were very personal and contained information about character and reputation was evident from the fact that, in 1851, the first libel case was brought against a credit reporting agency. In that case, a credit reporter included in his report the fact that the applicant in question was about to be divorced and therefore subject to property loss. A good reputation was an asset, and defamation was economic harm.

By the end of the nineteenth century, credit reporting had become a full-fledged industry with an army of file clerks and reporters. The shift was beginning, from the qualitative to the quantitative. Nevertheless, personal connections and social monitoring was still a part of the system, as was evident from credit bureaus relying on “Welcome Wagon” ladies who “inquired over coffee about the details of a newly arrived family’s circumstances while conducting a surreptitious inspection of the home’s condition and its furnishings.”2

Awash in personal data, credit bureaus began to think about the various ways in which information could be packaged, sold, and applied. For example, credit agencies began selling reports not only to lending institutions but also to employers looking to learn more about job applicants. In the wake of World War II, data collection drove new forms of niche marketing as the array of consumer products multiplied. Credit information also drove housing booms and mortgage lending. And credit information, repackaged in various formats informed everything from insurability to admissibility at private clubs. As the uses of credit reporting and credit data increased, so did the size and scope of the surveillance machine. In a 1950s article in Life magazine about credit ratings, the “author quipped that this national surveillance regime would ‘make even the head of the Soviet secret police gnash his teeth in envy.”3

The Installation of the Ultimate Surveillance System.

By the end of the twentieth century, once credit expansion had facilitated credit ubiquity, there were few ways out of the credit surveillance system. Credit scoring products were designed specifically for and sold to utilities companies, phone providers, and even healthcare operations. Credit scores had come to be a major factor not just in lending but also “govern[ing] consumers’ ability to rent and to buy housing, to afford an education, to shop for clothes and food, to commute to work, and even to receive medical care—that is, the basic materials of daily life.”4

For elite populations, with the ability to functionally opt out of the credit scoring game, paying cash for items and buying on reputation rather than FICO score, this surveillance is less obtrusive and less determinative of credit opportunities. Those families and individuals with big bank accounts can spend regardless of credit scores and also generally borrow regardless of credit score because they have desirable and high-value collateral.

For low-income families and individuals, and new populations being included into the reach of credit, the situation is much more dire. For example, the “strategy of extending the democratization of credit to undocumented workers” has allowed these families and individuals to experience the benefits of credit and “formal equality” within the credit market by “purchas[ing] cars, homes and other big-ticket items on credit.” Nevertheless, credit surveillance may be the entry point for other forms of governmental surveillance and ultimately may facilitate tracking for violent and exclusionary ends as the state “must be seen to actively clamp down on illegal immigrants and thereby to feed the social construction of protecting the interests of the American worker.”5

The quiet part of credit and its expansion was that it was part and parcel of surveillance capitalism. This surveillance has generally not been a subject of collective complaint or protest, and reform efforts have focused almost uniquely on obtaining consumer access to credit reports and making transparent the processes to dispute information on the reports. Rarely has the idea of creditworthiness itself or the financial surveillance that it entails been truly called into question by the legislative activity of policy initiatives. Josh Lauer has therefore observed: “It was not the welfare or protection of the state that spawned the first mass surveillance systems in the United States; it was the security of capitalism.”6

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This post is based on material from my upcoming book and, in case you missed it, so was this guest post last week about the geography of capital and necrotecture.

My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click on the book cover) and don’t forget to subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest posts!

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The law of succession has been designed to transfer only what it can value, title, and register in records. Everything families pass down that resists these three operations is invisible to it; everything passed down by individuals who are invisible to the operations fails. This is the wealth of the unrecognized as well as the dispossessed. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a novel about what happens to these invisible portions and people. And, ultimately, it is about what shape a feminist inheritance might take.

The gendered binary of owning things.

The gendered binary of ownership is alive and well in Song of Solomon, embodied in the contrastive portraits of Macon Dead II and his sister Pilate. Macon represents patriarchal, formalized, legally legible inheritance. He is the embodiment of acquisitive desire, a landlord whose tenement buildings are his truest passion:

Macon Dead dug in his pocket for his keys, and curled his fingers around them, letting their bunchy solidity calm him. They were the keys to all the doors of his houses (only four true houses; the rest were really shacks), and he fondled them from time to time…

Macon’s ethos is explicit: “Own things. And let the things you own own other things.” He is about market value and legal title, a Black man responding to the trauma of his father being murdered by white men who wanted his land.

Pilate, on the other hand, has a different relationship to property. She lives with her daughter and granddaughter on the edge of town, in the bare bones of a house that lacks modern amenities, where she makes and sells wine illegally. The house is a marginal space where the three women exist outside conventional domestic and economic norms, never making dinner, never worried about traditional jobs.1 Nevertheless, it is constantly filled with the scent of pine, baking bread, and wine pulp.

The quest that transforms a treasure hunt into family memory.

The two siblings represent different understandings of and orientations to wealth, and the embodiment of the tension between the two is a “moss-green sack hung from the ceiling” in Pilate’s house. Macon tells his son, Milkman, that Pilate is hiding gold that belongs to the family in the sack, leading Milkman to break into Pilate’s house and steal it. But when he opens the sack, there is no gold, only bones.

Undeterred, Milkman goes looking for the gold elsewhere. He travels to Pennsylvania, finds the cave, and is once again disappointed, no gold. Then, instead of going home, he keeps going south to Shalimar, Virginia, chasing the sound of his grandmother’s name. What he recovers there is not money but a genealogy: a great-grandfather named Solomon, and a children’s song that encapsulates the whole family history. He also learns that his ancestor knew to seek liberation in flight, even if it meant leaving loved ones behind.

Finally, Milkman pieces together the events that transpired after the siblings left the cave. Pilate went back to the cave, but in reality to retrieve the remains of their father, whose body had also been left to decompose there. The bones in the sack are his, an inheritance belonging to both Macon and Pilate but one that only Pilate has chosen to recognize and honor. The cave is the site that transformed Macon into a landlord and Pilate into a custodian of the dead.

The alchemy of feminist inheritance.

Milkman goes looking for gold and finds bones. Paternal inheritance fails because legal inheritance lines were not meant for the Dead family, whose name reflects a clerical error made by the Freedman’s Bureau. Family inheritance, stamped with the imprimatur of law, has been denied to them with the brutality of administrative procedure.

Milkman does receive an inheritance. But it comes from Pilate, the woman who carved her existence outside the ambit of institutions and wore her name, written on a scrap of paper and tucked away in an earring made out of her mother’s snuffbox. He is indisputably her heir.

As they came closer and saw the brass box dangling from her ear, Milkman knew that what with the earring, the orange, and the angled black cloth, nothing—not the wisdom of his father nor the caution of the world—could keep him from her.

Milkman’s inheritance, the bag of bones and the knowledge of his ancestors that accompanies it, is a legacy of enslavement and dispossession, of transcendence rather than monumentality. As Macon tells his son, truthfully, “Pilate can’t teach you a thing you can use in this world. Maybe the next, but not this one.”

Pilate’s lessons come from carrying bones for decades without owning them in any sense the law would recognize. She is a steward, holding something she cannot value and does not profit from. When she finally buries her father, putting the bones in the ground, she also buries her brass-box earring. Earth to earth, there are no remainder beneficiaries or records of preserved fortune. Everything Macon’s architecture aspires to do - accumulate, retain, entail, keep value inside the family’s boundary across generations - Pilate undoes in a single gesture.

Pilate’s gesture and her legacy are redistributive, a feminist inheritance in a land that refuses to recognize her family. What Pilate passes to Milkman is a form of wealth that cannot be hoarded, a song that can be sung by anyone and bones that belong to the ground. The inheritance she leaves him with is light but strong, and it takes nothing from anyone else. This is the one outcome that inheritance law was never meant to produce.

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how legal architecture protects dynastic wealth and extracts from low-income families along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click on the book cover) and don’t forget to subscribe to Inheriting Inequality to get the latest posts!

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Accounting systems, as I wrote about last week in the first installment of this series, were not created with female-coded wealth in mind. This is one problem. Then, there is also the problem of transfer. Conventional methods of wealth transfer have tended to fail women, underscoring the mismatch between women’s assets and the male-created, male-enforced rules. Women’s wills and other estate plans have been not only disallowed at certain points but also viewed with suspicion and outright hostility, by male relations, lawyers, and courts.

The Failure of Ruth Wilcox’s will.

A perfect illustration of both this dynamic can be found in E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End (1910).1 The novel is about multiple kinds of inheritance - individual, familial, societal, and national. But the key transfer in question, the one that drives the plot, relates to the house, Howards End. Howards End is a modest, red-brick farmhouse in the Hertfordshire countryside owned by Ruth Wilcox, who inherited it from her family (the Howards).

The house, like its owner, is understated in its mysticism and connection to an older, more earth-attuned way of life. Ruth Wilcox embodies this ethos, and has a deep connection to the house. Her spouse, however, belongs to a new and different order of being. He is a man of business and colonial profit, an industrialist who runs the Imperial and West African Rubber Company.

The novel begins with Ruth Wilcox befriending a young woman, Margaret Schlegel, who Ruth comes to see as her spiritual heir and the person who should rightly inherit Howards End. When Ruth Wilcox dies, early on in the novel, it is discovered that she left a handwritten note purporting to leave the house to Margaret. The note read: “To my husband: I should like Miss Schlegel (Margaret) to have Howards End.”

When the family finds the note, they are sent into a frenzy. Ruth’s meek and conventional daughter-in-law exclaims:

“But I say that note isn’t legal. Houses ought to be done by a lawyer …. Why, it’s only in pencil! I said so. Pencil never counts.”2

Henry Wilcox, Ruth’s widower, immediately dismisses the legality of the will. He does briefly consider whether he is morally obligated to transfer the house to Margaret out of respect for his dead wife’s wishes. These wishes are also quickly brushed aside. At the end of the day, Henry Wilcox’s legalistic and financial mind cannot fathom such a transfer:

How did she expect Howards End to be conveyed to Miss Schlegel? Was her husband, to whom it legally belonged, to make it over to her as a free gift? Was the said Miss Schlegel to have a life interest in it, or to own it absolutely? Was there to be no compensation for the garage and other improvements that they had made under the assumption that all would be theirs some day? Treacherous! treacherous and absurd!

The Wilcoxes don’t inform Margaret about the purported will but, in a twist of fate, Margaret does end up inheriting the house, through Henry Wilcox’s will not Ruth’s. After Ruth’s death, Margaret marries Henry Wilcox and it is this marriage that allows her to come into possession of the property. The classic combination of patrimony and matrimony prevail.

At the end of the novel, Henry declares to the whole family that Margaret will inherit the house, as his wife, and Dolly lets it slip that Ruth Wilcox wanted Margaret to have the house all those years ago. When Margaret asks her husband about it, Henry mentions the note saying, “I went into it thoroughly, and, [and] it was clearly fanciful.” Margaret lets the note go, but “something shook her life in its inmost recesses, and she shivered,” realizing that the house was in reality a failed gift from Ruth and not a deed transfer from Henry.

Material Possessions and Spiritual Heirs.

Ruth Wilcox designated Margaret as her heir, in an effort to bring a feminist inheritance to life. But this inheritance fails without the intervention of marriage because the other Wilcoxes don’t understand Ruth’s mystical estate (“To them Howards End was a house; they could not know that to her it had been a spirit, for which she sought a spiritual heir.”) And because, even if they had, they would not have honored Ruth’s wishes.

In this way, Howards End makes clear that there are two kinds of inheritance and two kinds of heirs. There is the legal heir and there is the spiritual heir - a gendered binary when it comes to inheritance lines and the connective points that compose them. This is a tension that recurs in a number of novels, from Henry James’ The Spoils of Poynton to Isabel Allende’s The House of Spirits.

In these variations of the female inheritance story, male wealth is entirely conventional, constituted by land, property-power, and the legal right to transfer the family legacy. The female inheritance story is one of being excluded from conventional wealth transfer and seeking alternate modes, ones that are informal, private, and not recognized as any kind of legal instrument. This predicament of being on the shadow side of the inheritance binary, instantiates what one scholar describes as “a perennial struggle and conflict between the social order, the law, and language on the one hand, and the individual Imaginary on the other.”

For the women in these stories, there is no will writing and there is no transfer of deed. There are scraps of paper, personal notebooks that carry family records, and marriage machinations. There are attempts to transfer the love of a house, the taste imbued in a collection, or the intangibles of family identity. Women are trying to imagine a way to bequeath that which cannot necessarily be valued or transferred at all. As the narrator in Howards End asks:

Is it credible that the possessions of the spirit can be bequeathed at all? Has the soul offspring? A wych-elm tree, a vine, a wisp of hay with dew on it – can passion for such things be transmitted where there is no bond of blood?”

That is the question Ruth Wilcox asked herself and answered in the affirmative. Unfortunately neither the law nor her husband cared to take real notice of her words or intentions.

Are there things you inherited without a will or things you felt were part of a “spiritual” inheritance?

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My upcoming book, The House That Family Money Built (UC Press, September 2026), offers a deep dive into how traditional legal architectures protect dynastic wealth and extracts along the same lines it always has: race, gender, and class. You can pre-order the book here (or click on the book cover) and don’t forget to subscribe to Inheriting Inequality so you don’t miss Part 3 of this series (spoiler alert, sign up if you like Song of Solomon).

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These are recurring questions in the world of inherited inequality and this new three-part series, let’s call it Feminist Trusts & Estates, is an attempt to provide some answers. Feminist inheritance, to clarify, is a worldview about inheritance. It is not the same thing as women inheriting more or women controlling more assets. Feminist inheritance is a project of the imagination, driven by foundational values rather than the selection of women over men in a traditional inheritance system.

The first step in discovering the world of feminist inheritance is identifying previously overlooked assets and learning how to ascribe value to them. That’s what this post is about. And, if we look past the usual account books for wealth, we can see there has always been a shadow ledger, pointing the way to a new system of valuation.

The secret lives of objects.

Traditional inheritance, to no one’s surprise, is a thoroughly male affair, at least in most Western traditions. Inheritance lines have generally been built on male property-power and have protected transfers from one man in the family to another. Men have passed down assets to other men, including houses, land, businesses, shares, cash, and equipment.

Inheritance has therefore been comprised of things that matter, that is to say things that hold financial value and retain that value. The fixation used to be land (yes, Downton Abbey), now it’s financialized assets. The continuing theme is men exchanging important things. As Peter Stallybrass has written, members of the dominant cohort - those who are male, white, and European - consider themselves to be “unhampered by a fixation upon objects, aware only of the market value of exchangeable commodities, rather than [the … ] emotional need for them.”

Women, working-class people, and racially minoritized people have all been excluded from this great project of passing down things of value, barred from owning land or even most forms of personal property. They have been allowed small objects with sentimental value, marginal forms of personal property - and then been critiqued as fetishizing those objects. Of them, Stallybrass writes, “people who fetishize things because of the ‘possibility that history, memory, and desire might be materialized in objects that are touched and loved and worn,’ offer examples of … [how] the objects they possess have a meaning beyond mere exchange value.”

Women and the food they make.

Women, in particular, have been equated with this kind of personal property, the kind that people call “priceless.” And their ownership as well as their transfer of these objects give us a peek behind the curtain at the items that rarely get accounted for in an estate. We see this in married women’s wills, under coverture, when they gave away the little that they could actually own, a dress, a pair of gloves, a set of pans. Or the inheritance lines that developed in families of enslaved people who were not allowed either to form legal families or own property. These families honored and cemented their relationships through the gift of everyday items.

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Similarly, literature is filled with examples of these kinds of invaluable and yet unvalued inheritances. In the novel Black Cake, the inheritance that cannot be valued through conventional financial practices arrives in the form of a frozen cake, which comes with stories that reveal family lineage and history. The inheritance of food constitutes its own subgenre in literature. In Pachinko, kimchi and its preparation are the primary economic lifeline and cultural inheritance passed down from a mother to her children - what keeps identity alive in a hostile society. The House of Spirits contrasts the patriarch’s focus on inheriting land and political power with matriarchal inheritance of family recipes. And the Joy Luck Club recounts a daughter’s inheritance of her mother’s seat at a long-running social club that meets to prepare ancestral recipes. Food is joy, sustenance, the emotional wealth of family, and cultural inheritance. A cake cannot, however, be put in a will or a trust; a recipe for beef empanadas or an abelskiver pan is not something that accountants will assess.

The problem of putting price tags on things.

The problem, then, is that these items have little to no assigned value according to conventional measures. They are not easily subject to commodification and are, therefore, difficult to include in an estate. The problem of valuation is the real stumbling block because the assets that these women held either have little economic value (a frozen cake, $9.95). Or, they have value, in the form of female labor that is never captured (cooking family dinner, $0).

Unpaid household and care labor is nothing new or surprising; and feminists have, in the past, proposed a number of solutions for properly compensating women doing this unpaid labor. In fact, “Wages for Housework” is an iconic movement as well as rallying cry. One facet of this problem that gets less attention is the inheritance aspect. No wages means no estate to transfer, it means a shadow inheritance at best.

A poignant illustration of this point can be found in Tillie Olsen’s story, “I Stand Here Ironing” (1956), which lays bare the difficulty of coming up with a “total” in the context of a mother’s contributions to her children. The story is a mother’s interior monologue while ironing. She’s contemplating a request from someone at her daughter’s school for a meeting. Her daughter “needs help.” While ironing, the mother’s thoughts range over how her own poverty has shaped her daughter’s identity and potentially her outcomes. Being poor, unable to find childcare, being hungry - these were the things she had to give her daughter, as well as all the housework she did, ironing, cleaning, caring for multiple children. It is a story about poverty and its legacy. But it is also a story about female inheritance, as the mother reflects on what she has given her daughter. The story closes with the mother invoking a wish: “Only help her to know—help make it so there is cause for her to know—that she is more than this dress on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.” The inheritance, psychologically fraught, is also impossible to quantify.

Taking the first step, making things count.

The mother ironing admits, with resignation, that she will never “total it all.” That is to say, she will never capture in either words or dollar amounts what she sacrificed and what she gave. Her statement is an admission that some contributions and some assets resist calculation. Or, more accurately, systems of capital resist coding economic value into these contributions. Over time, men engaged in legacy building have found ways to make all kinds of unusual property inheritable - aristocratic titles, memberships to male clubs, or rights to fish in a certain lake. The same alchemy of rights has never materialized for female-coded assets.

This is the starting point for the feminist estate, recognizing invisible assets as well as the fact that accounting systems are not built to capture their worth. This shadow ledger, the accounting of wealth that lies in kitchen cabinets and on ironing boards, has always been there. The problem is that no one has reconciled this ledger with the estate documents sitting in the lawyer’s office.

What kind of invisible inheritance have you received?

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I started this Substack one year ago, with no idea how to do anything. I wasn’t sure how people subscribed, what a note was, or what a weekly newsletter looked like. Fifty-two posts later, here we are, and I am so happy to be doing this with you all. I want to thank everyone who has subscribed and anyone who has been reading, liking, commenting, and sharing.

When Inheriting Inequality hit six months, I wrote a post about things I had learned up until that point. Now, I thought I would share what the view looks like at the end of the twelve months. The Substack has gone through a number of changes over the year, and here’s what I have learned so far:

1. The name you start with might not be the one you keep. When I started, I called the Substack The Inheritance Imagination, in an attempt to capture how the concept of inheritance seeps into everything and shapes the way we view so many parts of the landscape.

2. If you can capture the essence of your Substack in a couple of paragraphs, that’s your first post. My first post was entitled Privilege and Patrimonies and it was brief, but I still like it. It was about how patrimonies can be comprised of numerous kinds of inheritable assets, and how, historically and presently, they have represented a patriarchal system. More on that at the end of this post.

3. If people don’t get your Substack’s name, that is not a good sign. Over the first few months, I had a lot of people ask me what exactly the Inheritance Imagination was. They found it a bit too mysterious, too vague. I changed the name to Everyone Inherits Something, and the posts became more about the mechanisms of inheritance. The Everyone Inherits Something version reflected my belief that legacies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but it didn’t quite track my core interest in systems of inequality and how inheritance rules sustain them. I still have a big soft spot for the name The Inheritance Imagination. Maybe I am just a woman of mystery at heart.

4. The right name will help you not only find readers but position yourself with other writers in your area. Finding more people on Substack who were writing about inequality gave me the push I needed to make one more change. Inheriting Inequality was born. It took a while, to be honest, and you have to sometimes look hard to find the right people. When I started my feed was all menopause all the time. Now I’ve found my inequality people, and menopause content is at consistent 10%.

What you, the readers, have liked the most so far.

Through all these evolutions, it has been fascinating to see what you, as readers, respond to the most, and I thought you might like to see some data. Here you go: the top line of images is the three most popular posts I’ve written in terms of views. The Fraud & Fantasy (which is about the book London Is Falling) is pretty recent, while the other two have had more time to build up views. But the Upper Poor post seems perennially popular. Maybe not so hard to see why. It’s still a vibe.

The bottom three are the posts that got the most likes (marriage), most comments (zombies), and most subscribers (the meta-post). It’s interesting to me that there’s no overlap in the categories.

Having a year’s worth of data helps build a Substack’s manifesto.

And here’s how I’ve taken meaning from the data and aligned reader responses with my core mission:

1. Looking at the top posts is energizing because it shows that readers enjoy width and breadth. You’re willing to dive into all aspects of inheritance, where it shows up in ideas, and what it looks like in practice. I hope to continue broadening our understanding of where inheritance shows up and who benefits.

2. Some of the most consistently popular posts are about gender and marriage, which is great because, as you know by now, I like nothing more than writing and talking about how marriage creates gender and drives inequality. Expect more of that.

3. Ghosts aren’t going anywhere either. Turns out a lot of you like reading about zombie debt and witches as much as I like writing about them, so the necromoney thread will also continue. There are most certainly more hauntings where that came from.

4. All of this also tracks with THE BOOK. The House That Family Money Built is coming out on September 15th and one thing I can guarantee is that you will get consistent book content thrown in the mix, with more previews and behind-the-scenes takes as we get closer to the publication date.

That’s a wrap. Thank you again for being here and I’ll keep writing if you keep reading.

xoxo Allison

The Brothers Grimm, The Fisherman and His Wife (1812) (translated by Jack Zipes, 2014)

The story of The Fisherman and His Wife was a German fairy tale published by the Brothers Grimm in their 1812 collection. The tale is about a magical flounder who grants wishes. It’s about tale about greed and the destructive power of wanting more, reported female insatiability, and the fear of female sovereignty.

Here’s the story, briefly.

The story begins with a poor fisherman and his wife, Ilsebill, who live by the sea. One day, the fisherman catches a flounder who claims to be an enchanted prince and begs for his life. The fisherman releases him without asking for anything, but when he returns home and tells Ilsebill about what happened, she’s furious and sends him back to ask for more from the fish.

What follows is an escalating cycle of requests. First, the fisherman makes the request to turn their shack into a cottage, then into a stone castle. Then Ilsebill asks “couldn’t we be king?'“ and the fisherman makes the request. Ilsebill wants to be king, emperor, and finally pope. Each time, the fisherman returns to the flounder, who grants the wish.

Ultimately, Ilsebill tells her husband that she wants to be like God, to have the powers to cause the sun and the moon to rise. This time, the story makes clear, no good will come of the request: “The mountains were shaking, and boulders were rolling from the cliffs into the sea. The sky was as black as pitch.” This time, the enchanted flounder refuses. The couple is returned to their original status, living in the shack by the sea.

On its face, the story is about greed. The story teaches us that some forms of hunger are persistent and not satisfied by acquisitions, which quickly become disappointing. Escalation is inevitable but ineffective, because there is no point at which something is “enough.” This kind of hunger is a logic, not a need, and we are taught that the hunger was never about the food itself.

Were reports of her insatiability greatly exaggerated?

It is also clear, however, that there may be some foul play at work when it comes to reporting. Ilsebill is identified as being the problem. We know she is the problem because she is the only one with a name. Contrary to coverture conventions, she is individuated. She is not just Mrs. Fisherman. Ilsebill and her growing needs are actually the engine of the plot. Her husband is just the messenger, just following orders. Like he says to the enchanted fish:

Though I don’t agree with my wife’s request,
I’ve come to ask it nonetheless.

If we look a little closer, we might get suspicious. Take, for example, the start of the fisherman’s repeated address to the flounder:

Flounder, flounder, in the sea,
if you’re a man, then speak to me.

The fisherman is the one with ritual standing to summon the flounder, not Ilsebill. He knows the words and holds the power to summon the enchanted fish. Moreover, the fisherman appeals to the enchanted prince on the shared grounds of masculinity (if you’re a man), underscoring that the apparatus of summoning and speaking is notably masculine. The fisherman holds the power, using his voice to make requests while simultaneously displacing blame.

Accordingly, despite his protestations, the fisherman benefits from each escalation in wealth and status. He suddenly owns carriages, crystal chandeliers, thrones encrusted with diamonds, magnificent gardens, and pleasure forests. He feasts at tables laden with food and sits in rooms surrounded by servants. The fisherman occupies the privileges of power while assigning its oppression and excess to his wife. She acts as a safe place for him to store his own hunger, and so Ilsebill takes the blame for a marital if not fully masculine enterprise.

The result is a type of modified coverture, in which the husband gains assets and authority, and yet is not obliged to take accountability. Rights without responsibilities, all done through unreliable reporting. This story is a reminder to the wives of fishermen everywhere: be careful who tells your story, who reports your requests.

Beware of women, because they are scary and want to control you.

The story can also be understood to offer another kind of warning, this time to the men of the land. Not only does the fisherman hoard and manipulate the reporting power but he also, through his reporting, lets slip his deepest fears about his wife and women in general - that their deepest desire is to rule over men. In this sense the tale can be read as an elongated and elaborate panic attack grounded in the fear of women’s sovereign power.

One of the most remarkable things about the story is Ilsebill’s desires. Her requests are not for material splendor; instead she is after political power and, ultimately, the power of life and death. It is remarkable that she - not her husband - is made king, emperor, and pope, and at each step he becomes increasingly beholden to her authority. Ilsebill sits on thrones, wears a crown, holds a scepter, and says unimaginable things like: “I am king, and you are my husband.”

Could it be, then, that more than anything the tale is about the male fear of conventional household rules being upended and wives becoming the husbands, of female power and sovereignty? Could it be that the fisherman (and maybe even the fish) fears what would happen in a world of female sovereignty, when men would be subject to female jurisdiction? Could the baseline fear be that of being covered and not covering?

What Ilsebill wanted is unknowable. What words Ilsebill spoke, what requests she truly made, are unknowable. So the question of whether the fisherman reported his own desires, hers, or a distorted version of a reasonable request persists. At the end, the couple is returned to their shack to sit among the remains of a fever dream. The reader is left with remains of a husband’s testimony against his wife and the fear that drove him to speak it.

Does this pattern remind you of any other fairy tales? Any other manipulative wives or evil witches who get the blame?

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I’ve got a book coming out in September, check out my website to learn more and pre-order it!

https://www.allisonannatait.com/

Traditional inheritance law grapples with questions about dead ancestors extending a controlling hand from the grave in order to control money beyond death. Now, we are dealing with the flip side, the unborn being endowed with legal rights to property interests, to control property from beyond birth. The ever-enlarging raft of fetal personhood laws create legal phantoms, entities that wield economic power and alter the flow of capital, even if there is never a living birth.1

The Ghost Estate and Nevernatal Inheritance.

One of the oddest outcomes of the fetal personhood statutes is the case of the “nevernatal” heir.2 When fetal personhood laws create property rights and expectancy rights, fetuses can legally inherit wealth while in the womb. If the fetus is born, it’s possible that no inheritance problems arise. However, if the fetus isn’t born, Pandora’s box opens. If a miscarriage occurs or the pregnancy is terminated, the fetus becomes a legal decedent whose estate must be probated. As legal scholars ask, can we presume that “a zygote-embryo-fetus from a failed pregnancy would be intestate”?3 Or would fetuses need wills in this phantasmagoric world of inheritance rights? More generally, would pregnant people be obliged to disclose their pregnancies in service of asserting the property rights of the fetus? And, of course, the question of the slayer rule is lurking in these nevernatal estates. Perhaps most striking, however, is that courts, lawyers, and the probate system would be called upon to plan and administer the estates of legal phantoms, entities that never drew a single breath.

The State of Suspended Animation.

Another spectral scenario in which fetal personhood would enable the unborn to be perpetually serviced by a cadre of lawyers and trustees is in vitro fertilization (IVF). When the Alabama Supreme Court, in 2024, expanded its definition of “children” to include frozen IVF embryos kept in a cryogenic nursery, the justices opened the door to the possibility that cryopreserved embryos possessed property and inheritance rights. Accordingly, thousands of these fertilized embryos, existing in a state of suspended animation, could become beneficiaries, effectively locking up family trusts and paralyzing the assets of the living indefinitely. If these unborn “children” were trust beneficiaries, would trustees owe them fiduciary duties, and how would they be forced to take their interests into consideration or make distributions?4 The unborn and undead beneficiaries - the cryopreserved embryos - would add another layer of liminality and eternal life to dynasty trusts.

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The Troubling Case of Child Support.

A third property entitlement that some states have enacted is the right of the unborn to child support. In Georgia, thanks to the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, a pregnant person can seek certain forms of child support for an unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat. And federal legislation (the proposed Unborn Child Support Act) may follow suit. While different than the two previous examples, in some ways, the move to grant support entitlements to the unborn is the same in that it overturns traditional doctrine in property and family law that require a live birth to trigger personhood status and financial rights. Because the right goes to the fetus and not to the pregnant person, these kinds of statutes generate economic rights for the phantom being, shifting financial timelines. They untether money from conventional timelines and lifespans, and they transform the unborn into a distinct category of property holders, just like the undead.

No Future, Which Future, Whose Future?

In his iconic work, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman analyzed how “the Child” is perpetually deployed as the ultimate symbol of the future. The Child is a political framework, Edelman argued, because invoking the future in this way demands deferred satisfaction as well as compliance with heteronormative ideologies. The invocation also effectively suppresses dissent, which gets labeled as “anti-Child.” Edelman wrote: “That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”

Fetal personhood and the endowment of property rights to the unborn - cells, fetuses, and frozen fertilized embryos - extend the scope of his argument and reveal the summoning of the Child in a new way. Where Edelman showed us the Child as a political alibi; fetal personhood laws show us the Child as both political alibi and economic instrument. Fetal personhood in the realm of inheritance makes literal the unimpeachable idea of investment in the future and highlights the perils that come with ascribing rights to these faintly embodied expectancies. For the unborn, the new legal phantoms populating our inheritance system, the future is as haunted as the past. Or, as Edelman wrote, “the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past.”

This wraps up the necromoney trilogy. I'd love to know which thread you'd most like to see explored in the future. And let me know if you have requests for the next series. As I’ve always said, I’m highly suggestible!

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Closing note: I’ve launched a new website for my book, please check it out and let me know what you think. Any ideas for additions or improvements are more than welcome.

The Hoarder Ghost: holding forever property

Last week, I wrote about dynasty trusts and forever property. The take-away was that we are increasingly creating the legal conditions for money and assets (as well as debt) to live forever. Dynasty trusts are just one example of these new forever forms of property.1 And all these new forms of ownership are, truth be told, very old.

New forms of forever property revive aristocratic and feudal forms of ownership and they elicit ghosts of individual landlords, overlords, and titled lords. Karl Marx described these ghosts when he wrote about his money hoarder, obsessed with the burial and entombment of assets, wishing to turn his wealth into “an imperishable subterranean hoard with an entirely furtive private relationship to the commodity-owner.”2

The hoarder ghost hovers over contemporary versions of the same actor. There is a bevy of broligarchs who are conjured by the social imagination when we talk about hoarders, corporate rent seekers, and late-stage capitalists. We could invoke any of the Davos Kings that peddle stories of trickle-down economic benefit and couch corporate profit as social welfare maximization. They all share the same ghostly outlines. And they all come with warnings.

The warning: When hoarding becomes the organizing principle of an economy, these ghosts warn us that systems of forever property serve the dead at the expense of the living.

The Empire Ghost: property power, theft, and extraction

There are also ghosts of empire that are called forth by these neofeudal and neocolonial forms of ownership. These are the ghosts of systems past and present that speak for the collectivity of legislators, landowners, legatees. These ghosts have presided over the theft of land, the sale of bodies, and the articulation of legal hierarchies.

Today, we are still talking about these old empires and trying to understand the new empires that are being built, often directly over the ruins of old ones. There are systems of credit and debt that keep poor and marginalized populations devoid of economic bargaining power. There are family corporations that look like the patrimonial empires of the renaissance and early-modern eras. And there are new enclosures - the Third Enclosure Movement is underway - “now unfolding through the systematic enclosure of the digital data commons.”3 The ghosts of empires past bequeath blueprints to today’s empires and watch as construction proceeds apace.

The warning: property systems built on violence and theft don't disappear — they persist in the structures we inherit. These ghosts warn us that we are still living inside someone else’s colonial property logic, whether we can see it or not.

The Dispossessed Ghost: the ones seeking retributive justice

On the other side of the veil, there are ghostly apparitions that belong to the forgotten and the dispossessed. These are ghostly apparitions who remind us that on the margins of the hoarded estate lie the remains of those who were disinherited, those who never dared to hope that inheritance would gild their lives.

This is the ghost of Basil Campbell, the son of an enslaved man who was denied an inheritance in 1910 because the marriage between his mother and father was never legally recognized under slavery's property codes. Spotted as well is the ghost of Elouise Pepion Cobell, Yellow Bird Woman, a Blackfeet Nation activist who spent decades fighting the federal government to account for Indigenous land trust funds.

, writing about the gothic, ghosts, and trauma, says:

The haunted house is a house where something bad happened. This we know, and we also know it’s a house where something bad is still happening, where the past keeps jumping into the present. The bricks of the place have kind of absorbed that history; in some ways, a trace lingers, retains its power.

The ghosts of the dispossessed are the ones still haunting the house on the hill.

The warning: these ghosts are a call for notice and an unstated demand for reckoning. As Eve Tuck and C. Ree write in A Glossary of Haunting: “Haunting . . . is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.”4 Spectrality is reprisal and ghosts are a visible plea for justice.

Jacques Derrida, who dreamed up the idea of hauntology, proclaimed that “there is no inheritance without a call to responsibility.”5 It is up to us to see the inheritances that exist all around us - the ghosts are pointing to them - and to ask ourselves how wealth can be freed, debts paid, and profit shared.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. What ghosts or ghost stories did I miss?

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More importantly, on a day-to-day basis, money is starting to feel unreal and spending has become untethered from earning, saving, and the usual time horizon of income and wealth management.4 It all feels futile, nothing feels real. Money has transcended the conventional time horizon and lives as the undead; it has become necromoney.

This month, here at Inheriting Inequality, I’ll be exploring the death vibes that are seeping into the personal and legal regulation of family money and what dead-hand control (inheritance law’s favorite hand) looks like in these troubled times. Today’s post is about the money systems we’ve created in which debt never dies and wealth lives forever. This is the legal necromancy of necromoney in action - it has no limits, no natural lifespan, and no human time horizon.

The Case of the Zombie Debt

Zombie debt is debt that lasts forever, and it can take several forms. There is, for example, the debt that keeps accruing, long past the lifespan of the thing acquired, because of exorbitant interest rates and a never-ending string of fees and fines. Forever debt.

Take Wakita Shaw, who began with a $425 loan from a payday lender. She wasn’t able to pay the debt on time and so the payday lender ultimately obtained a body attachment order, which constituted a warrant for her arrest. Ms. Shaw was put into jail for three days before her mother could come up with the money to post bail. By the time she was thrown into jail, the payday loan debt, including penalties and interest, had grown to $855. Then, after the arrest, Shaw was faced with a new bill for $1,250 for bail. The debt grew and grew and grew, persisting way past its original iteration. Same thing happened to Cori Winfield. Winfield had an original debt of $4,900 owed to an auto lender that doubled over time – and kept growing even after the car had been repossessed. Zombie debt on a zombie car.5

Harassment practices are so effective in cases like this that credit consumers have even paid money on debt that had already been satisfied – the classic definition of “zombie debt” – in order to avoid the disruption brought on by arrest and possible confinement. Low-income women, especially minoritized women, are particularly susceptible to paying zombie debt. They are targeted by predatory lenders, so they are more likely to hold this kind of overpowering debt. They are also, often, single caretakers who are afraid of putting their children at risk by leaving them without care in the case of arrest and jail time. So they feed the zombie, which we know you’re not supposed to do, but sometimes you have no other choice.

The Problem with Dynasty Trusts

On the other end of the wealth spectrum, it’s not about the debt that lasts forever. It’s the family fortune that never dies. Wealth preservation mechanisms are nothing new, but they’ve become supercharged in the past fifty years by legal changes that have made it possible to safeguard money - forever. Perpetual property, held in trust, is now a real thing and in almost half the American states you can create a trust that will last anywhere from 365 years to 1,000 years to simply forever, depending on your location.

Changes to perpetuities law, pushed through legislatures in tax havens and business-friendly states, have led to a rebirth of wealth planning services and the development of a host of new trust forms. Trust companies in the U.S. states, like those in the U.K. spiderweb of tax havens, continually invent new products with names meant to appeal to their target audience: Dynasty Trusts, Legacy Trusts, and a “Bloodline Trust.” One company has even boldly marketed a “Have Your Cake and Eat It Too” Trust (HYCET Trust^®). A South Dakota trust company, pushing its services to a global clientele, lists the trust opportunities available for “international families,” including a “South Dakota Non-Resident Alien (NRA) Domestic Dynasty Trust,” a “South Dakota Stand-By Domestic Dynasty Trust,” and a “South Dakota Pre-Immigration Domestic Trust.”

This competition between American states for financial services and trust business, a “race to the bottom,” is being played out not just in the American states but around the globe, both onshore and offshore, across island landscapes and prairie states. Jurisdictions are rushing to become purveyors of eternal financial life, traders in the profitable afterlife of money. We don’t have client lists for these trusts, since a key selling point is privacy. But you can bet that you would recognize many of the names, and that you could successfully map it against the Forbes list of the world’s richest people.

Perpetual life, an afterlife, eternal life. We are living in a world that now runs on tracks of perpetual financial liability and perpetual trusts. This financial binary represents not just the logical conclusion of deregulated money - money that has been set free of conventional confines - but also makes sense to us because we’ve finally discovered we’re living among the undead.

Question: do you have any money experiences that resonate with these phenomena?

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The court, to be clear, was not impressed with George. The court remarked: “Fortunately in our Democratic society the vow of marriage to care for a spouse until death remains a wee bit intact even for the wealthy.” In a strange move, the court even invoked coverture as a reason to give her money (“The State legislature has maintained an iota of the ancient concept that a marriage of two people creates a unity in property by defining the property held by a married couple as ‘marital property’”).

The outcome of the case is important - equitable distribution saved the day. What may be more interesting, however, is the fact that George felt justified in proclaiming that his wife was never allowed to hold property. This statement embodies the crux of women’s positionality with respect to property, at least historically, across the wealth spectrum. Always a manager, never an owner.

That’s the story because those were the rules. Property law generally prohibited married women from owning assets - although there were important exceptions (detailed in my coverture series), and married women owned much more property than the rules and written history would have us believe. But, even as non-owners, married women nevertheless managed money. They made money and spent money, budgeted and bought.

On the high end of the wealth spectrum, women have historically acted as estate managers, overseeing large staffs and running households the size of large corporations. Think of Downton Abbey, Lady Grantham, and all the work it took to make the house run. Even recently, this model has had some purchase in legal proceedings. In a New York divorce case, Sykes v. Sykes (2014), another husband was trying to keep assets from his long-term spouse by arguing that she did no household labor “be it cooking, cleaning, child care, or removing the plastic from the dry cleaning.” In other words, she didn’t deserve a part of his hedge fund because she didn’t take the dry cleaning out of the plastic cover.

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The judge, however, was having none of it. He wrote: “Like a latter-day Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, who unquestionably runs the household at Downton Abbey despite the presence of Mr. Carson, Mrs. Hughes, Mrs. Patmore and Daisy, defendant unquestionably ran the Sykes household in New York, East Hampton and Paris despite the presence of cooks, personal assistants and the person who unsheathed the dry cleaning.” Women, the court clarified, were working when they spent time and energy overseeing large households.

The story of women as money managers is similar in middle-class households, as evidenced by the numerous housewifery handbooks that have been published across centuries, meant to help married women in their well-acknowledged task. According to John Fitzherbert’s 1525 Book of Husbandry, for example, a housewife was supposed to “to go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, capons a male chicken fattened for eating, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of corn grain of any kind, not maize. And also to buy all manner of necessary things belonging to a household.”

On the lower end of the wealth spectrum, as historians have rightly pointed out, poorer women were always “allowed” to work. They had to work to put food on the table (which is why blanket statements that women were not allowed to work send a clear signal about the centering of middle- and upper-class white women). These women worked in service, took in laundry, sold eggs and bread. They took in boarders and mended clothing. In fact, their work was often the mainstay of their home as well as other homes for which they provided labor.

In addition, before women had access to formal credit, these women were tasked with negotiating credit with vendors, like the grocer or the baker. They were bargaining on a daily basis, insisting on proper accountings as merchants tracked their household debt in store account books. As one German-American housewife told a daily newspaper in 1882: “I buy everything on credit until I get no more, then I go to another store and do the same there.”

In our current wave of contestation over what it means to be a married woman and a wife, people are consistently pointing out the hypocrisy of the new generation of tradwives. These women are consummate entreprenuers and rabid capitalists, people point out. And it’s obviously true.

However, wives making money and being entrepreneurial on behalf of the family (including by selling advice on how to be a housewife) is nothing new. It’s just that tradwives, past and present, are not fighting to be owners or to validate their legal rights. They’re just going about their business, as married women have done for centuries, making and minding the money. It’s going to take divorce, not marriage, to let us really know what the tradwives think about who owns the family money.

Question: Who pays the bills and manages the money in your household?

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Account One: The Death of Walter Scott.

In 2015, Walter Scott, a Black man driving a Mercedes-Benz in South Carolina, was pulled over by the police for a broken taillight. As Scott ran from the officer, trying to evade arrest, the officer shot him eight times in the back, killing him. Scott had long struggled to pay child support and had spent time in jail on three separate occasions due to child support arrears. At the time of Scott’s death, there was a warrant out for his arrest due to failure to make child support payments and knowledge of the warrant, friends and family members suggested, was likely what spurred Scott to run. As an attorney for Scott’s family remarked at a press conference at the time: “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”

Account Two: The Life of Cleopatra Cameron.

In 2009, Cleopatra Cameron, a white woman, was getting a divorce. The granddaughter of wealthy oilman Arthur Cameron and beneficiary of a trust created by her father, Cameron was receiving $40,000 per month in trust distributions at the time of her divorce. The trial court ordered Cameron to pay $8,863 monthly in child support and ordered the bank that was managing her trust to pay the child support payment directly to the father each month. Around the time that the divorce was finalized, Cameron took a trip to South Dakota (one of the new “onshore offshore states”) and decided to move the trust there. She then asked a South Dakota court to decide whether the trust was obligated to make the direct child support payments. The South Dakota Supreme Court said no. There was no requirement that Cameron’s trust pay the child support orders. The court stated: “Our Legislature … has emphatically rejected even the specter of an argument that would allow a child support creditor to reach trust funds.”

These stories showcase the highly racialized nature of child support regulation, punitive on the one hand and privileged on the other. The stories also help illuminate how the system creates pipelines for some and loopholes for others.

The pipeline to incarceration

On the low-income end of the wealth spectrum, child support burdens primarily low-income and Black men in particular, existing as a pathway to incarceration. Entry into the pipeline begins when child support goes unpaid, especially if the child’s family is receiving government assistance. Families are required to sign their right to child support over to the state when they apply for programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which means that the state will automatically pursue the debt almost immediately and any child support due is actually owed to the government. About 25% of all child support arrears are owed to the government and go to the government - not the child - when they are recouped.

In South Carolina, being five days late on a payment can trigger a civil contempt hearing, which in turn can mean ending up in jail for up to a year. At the time of Scott’s death, one out of every eight people incarcerated in South Carolina were in custody because of failure to pay child support. Making matters worse, most states refuse to modify child support orders during incarceration and interest is charged on the original debt. The result is that people leave jail owing significantly more than they did going in, including added fees related to their incarceration.

The loophole that preserves family fortunes

On the other end of the wealth spectrum, family fortunes are safe within asset protection trusts. Beneficiaries are not considered to be owners of the trust property because of the loophole that is the trust’s divided ownership (see last week’s post for an explainer). Accordingly, trust assets can’t be garnished or attached in any other way, like they could be and would be if they were sitting in a regular checking account. Some states, like California, have reformed the rules to make it easier to recover money from a trust. But tax haven states, like South Dakota or Nevada, make it virtually impossible. At the end of the day, the debt doesn’t disappear - Cleopatra Cameron still owed the child support. But because government benefits are not at stake, the burden of pursuing the money rests with the custodial parent. That is to say, it was up to Cameron’s husband to put in the time and cover the legal expense of seeking payment.

Ultimately, child support is defined by these pipelines and loopholes, which create cycles of poverty and generations of wealth. Child support can either decimate or reinforce family wealth and is reflective of the larger systems we live within, which sustain complex forms of inequality by keeping people and communities in either basement quarters or spacious suites within the house of family money.

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This is a series about who gets to be the exception to law's rules, and what the exceptions tell us about power. In the last two posts, I wrote about Queens and feme sole traders being exempt from coverture. This week may be my favorite - women and their separate estates.

My fascination with the separate estate trust started when I was a 1L and saw a reproduction of this William Hogarth print in a textbook about the history of the common law. It was set next to a few paragraphs about marriage settlements and the eye-opening statement that trusts were the first form of married women’s property. This brief mention was enough to send me down a long research path that I’m still on today. But enough about my law school days (unless you actually want to read the first paper I ever wrote about the separate estate).

What was the separate estate?

In its most basic form, a separate estate was a set of assets put in trust for a married woman, specifically for her “sole and separate use.” The separate estate offered a way around the rules of coverture because of the nature of the trust form: the trustee held legal title while the wife held equitable title. The wife did not therefore legally own the property but it was held for her benefit and she could use it according to the trust terms. And this is why the separate estate is known as the first form of married women’s property, before statutes democratized the right.

Parents, family members, and even unmarried women themselves could establish separate estate trusts. But since these trusts were primarily intended to protect the property rights of a woman during marriage, most separate estates were created in anticipation of marriage.

Separate Estate Trusts and Blackstone’s Marriage Settlement

When the separate estate was created as part of a marriage settlement, any property put in trust was available to the beneficiary to direct as she chose, within the parameters of the trust terms. Separate estates were also commonly created in anticipation of second marriages, when women tended to create separate estates for themselves using funds inherited at the death of the first spouse.

In one of the more ironic examples, Sir William Blackstone - who articulated the great rule of coverture in his Commentaries - married a woman, Sarah Clitherow, with a separate estate of over £6,500 ($2 million in today’s dollars). To ensure the estate remained separate from Blackstone’s personal assets, it was managed by Sarah’s brother and two of Blackstone’s legal colleagues from Lincoln’s Inn. Demonstrating the dangers of spousal interference, however, Blackstone negotiated, renegotiated, and amended the marriage settlement multiple times. Over time, he managed to direct Sarah’s funds away from her original diversified portfolio in trust toward mortgage loans — including, ultimately, a mortgage loan to himself. (Here’s the whole story thanks to new research by Julia Rudolph.)

Why These Trusts Were Allowed

While these trusts provided great benefit to the women for whom they were created, there is no doubt that the ultimate goal was not the economic empowerment of women. These trusts were, instead, an important tool for preserving family wealth and keeping money safe when a daughter married. Highlighting the axiomatic nature of family wealth preservation, and stating it with characteristic wit, Samuel Johnson remarked: “It is mighty foolish to let a stranger have [your estate] because he marries your daughter.”

That preserving great estates and family fortunes was of paramount importance could be seen in common trust language. Standard provisions kept trust assets from being accessed by a husband or his creditors, in case the new son-in-law turned out to be a spendthrift or a gambler. Similarly the terms usually provided for trust assets to return to the family of origin if the marriage produced no children. The amount of control that the married woman had over the assets - both income and principal - varied. In some cases, the wife’s rights were generous and extensive, in some cases extremely limited.

Elite Women’s Rights as a Template

Despite the fact that these trusts were a wealth preservation mechanism, separate estates nevertheless allowed women to be financial and legal actors, putting them on the court record as juridical beings who were “uncovered” for purposes pertaining to their money in trust. This had lasting effect, as did the fact that the language written into separate estate trust documents served as a model and template for the Married Women's Property Acts. These Acts would, in the minds of many, bring about an end to coverture. New statutory rights both in England and the United States were modeled on and traced over the property rights that had been pioneered through the separate estate. In this way, the separate estate was a clear forerunner to the increase in women’s economic rights and an early iteration of economic citizenship for married women.

Through the configuration of the wife as a separate entity, the separate estate destabilized gender certainties, especially when it came to money, and introduced the idea of divided household sovereignty. The separate estate was a legal device that moved married women's property rights forward and, ultimately, offered a template for future rights-holding. The separate estate helped “level up” women’s property rights and marked the beginning of the end of coverture not just for elite women but for all women.

Question: When the law finally extended property rights to all married women, it used a rich woman’s trust fund as the template. What does it tell us that this was considered reform?

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Last week, I wrote about coverture’s first exception, the Queen. The Queen was, however, only one of several exceptions to the rule. A second exception to the rule was the feme sole trader, the woman who ran her own business and earned money, just like a man. While the first exception demonstrated the exceptionalism of embodied political power, the feme sole trader exception reveals the benefits for women of being proximate to economic power and acting as drivers of capital.

What did a feme sole trader look like?

Take Susanna Passavant. Passavant was born into a Huguenot family of jewelers in the early 1700s, and when she was young her parents arranged for her apprenticeship with George Willdey, who belonged to the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers. In the early 1750s, Passavant opened her own shop, The Plume of Feathers, which was a luxury boutique specializing in jewelry, accessories, and toys.

This on its own was a noteworthy accomplishment. What was even more noteworthy, however, was that when Passavant married, she continued trading - as a feme sole trader - and maintained her successful business without any interference from her husband. Over the years, Passavant’s reputation grew to both national and international proportions, and she exported goods to many high-profile clients including George and Martha Washington.

What do we know about other feme sole traders?

Passavant was not an anomaly. Both in London and other cities with mercantile bases, there were feme sole traders working as cloth and candles merchants, dressmakers, shoemakers, tavern keepers, brewers, and bakers.1 In eighteenth-century London, at least 165 women registered in guild books as silversmiths, 250 as printers, and an estimated 500 women “traded as millinery proprietors.” Studies of of the census data for England and Wales between 1851 and 1911 have found that “at least 30% of the total number of entrepreneurs, or business proprietors, were female.”2

While guild registries and census data did not track the marital status of the proprietor, feme sole traders could be identified through the court records, if they registered their status, and their business interests could also be tracked through wills. In one familiar business pattern, women inherited businesses from a parent and continued to operate the business while married, without the involvement of the husband. There were also women who were apprenticed - like Susanna Passavant- and built business assets of their own to pass down to their children.

What was the legal authority for this?

The legal authority for feme sole trader status resided in local city customs, so each city regulated the registration of these business women. Once a married woman registered herself as a “feme sole” trader in a local Court of Record, she was able to operate as an independent person.3 Her business had to be entirely distinct from her husband’s, otherwise she would be considered his assistant or agent. Likewise, a husband could not involve himself in a feme sole trader’s business operations. If he did, her status as a feme sole trader could be challenged in court.4

What was the reason for the feme sole trader exemption?

This exemption and latitude allowed to certain women has the ring of empowerment, and the histories, still being uncovered, signal the incompleteness of the stories we have been told. Scrutinizing the legal justifications for the feme sole trader exception is, however, instructive - and two justifications stand out.

The first and most compelling justification for English lawmakers was that the exception provided a measure of financial protection for husbands and lenders. Once a married woman was a feme sole trader, she could be sued by lenders/creditors as a single women and her husband’s assets were safe if her business failed or went bankrupt.5 (This was directly opposite to the outcome under the doctrine of coverture, when the husband would be liable for all of the wife’s debts.) In fact, even when the debt was the husband’s alone, lenders sometimes tried to claim that the wife was a feme sole trader in order to go after the money from a different legal avenue. Bottom line: lenders came out ahead.

Second, feme sole trader status was a way for the law to enable women to keep and manage their own earnings if and when their husbands were away or abandoned them. These retained earnings acted as a social safety net and kept women from imposing on the public purse. This was an early version of what we call today privatizing the family and the feme sole trader exemption served the purpose of keeping the government out of the business of resourcing families in need.

The feme sole trader exception reveals several truths. That married women were surviving and thriving in multiple forms of trade well before the end of coverture. That women with parental wealth, who inherited businesses or secured apprenticeships like Passavant, benefitted from rights and opportunities that other women did not have. And that the law tolerated the expansion of rights for certain married women because it served the financial needs of capital and the State.

At the end of the day, Susanna Passavant was not given the right to run a successful business on account of her talent or a legal desire to encourage women. Passavant was accorded legal rights in order to minimize her husband’s liability, open her business assets to creditor claims, and keep her resourced in case her husband did not fulfill his marital obligation to support her. Legal rights for married women were co-extensive with expanded support for the capital that drove markets.

Question: Was the feme sole trader the original "girl boss" — celebrated for her independence and economic power, while the legal architecture around her operated to serve patriarchal power. Sound familiar?

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Coverture for most women.

A brief recap. The rules of coverture derived from Norman customs that were forcibly introduced into England in the wake of 1066. Before the conquest, “women had legal rights, some owned land and their own fortune, ruled over their tenants, could marry or separate freely and could choose their heirs.” After the invasion and the installation of new customs, women lost their status as rights-holders.

Under coverture, a wife was not a full juridical being in the eyes of the common law. A married woman could not sue or be sued; she could not form contracts or buy and sell property apart from her husband. Moreover, once a woman was married, any property that the woman brought to the marriage came under the control of her husband. The common law courts prioritized the rights of the husband as the head of the household over those of the woman who was “covered.”

Autonomy for the Queen.

Just as there was a rule of coverture, however, there was the exception: the Queen. Sir William Blackstone , who presented the most famous articulation of what coverture was, also described the Queen’s exemption. He wrote in his Commentaries:

[The Queen] is a public person, exempt and distinct from the king; and not, like other married women, so closely connected as to have lost all legal or separate existence so long as the marriage continues. For the queen is of ability to purchase lands, and to convey them, to make leases, to grant copyholds, and do others acts of ownership, without the concurrence of her lord …. In short, she is in all legal proceedings looked upon as a feme sole, and not as a feme covert; as a single, not as a married woman.

The reason for this exemption was grounded in the nature of the Crown, which was thought to exist before and above the common law, thereby superseding the ordinary rules of marriage. In addition, the “two bodies” theory of the monarch supported the idea that the Queen - like any monarch - held both a natural, human body and a political body. The private body of the wife could not overpower the public body of the sovereign.

Tellingly, however, this exemption applied not only to reigning Queens but also to Queen consorts - those married to the monarch. Blackstone explained that Queen consorts had to be exempt from coverture rules because “the wisdom of the common law would not have the king … troubled and disquieted on account of his wife’s domestic affairs.” Consequently, the common law vested even the Queen consort with the “power of transacting her own concerns, without the intervention of the king, as if she was an unmarried woman.” A ruling Queen’s royalty meant she was no ordinary “housewife.” A Queen consort’s exceptional status was directly connected to keeping the King unbothered by domestic cares as much as it was tied to her personal status.

Two Women Who Embodied the Exception: Elizabeth I and Victoria

Elizabeth I, who governed as Queen Regnant in England from 1558-1603, claimed the two-bodies doctrine on her own terms. As a monarch at war, speaking to the troops in Tilbury in 1588, Elizabeth proclaimed: “I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.” Admitting her personal body to be feminine and feeble, she aggressively claimed her sovereign body, turning the weakness of her female body into irrelevance rather than disqualification. Moreover, with no husband to “cover” her, Elizabeth fit the doctrine perfectly. She was a feme sole both in law and in political theory. She had no need of a husband’s concurrence to rule, to contract, to hold the nation as property.

The case of Queen Victoria (who ruled from 1837-1901) was something different and more complicated since she was married and happily so. Victoria, in fact, became revered as an icon of middle-class femininity because she centered the domestic in both the personal (wife and mother) and the political (mother to the nation). She fused the monarch’s two bodies, rejecting the divide that Elizabeth so passionately named. Nevertheless, like Elizabeth, Victoria never ceded power. Victoria never relinquished any of her royal entitlements, and Albert never gained any of coverture's husbandly powers. The consort exemption meant to spare kings from the pull of domestic affairs created, in this case, a husband with no form of authority over a wife other than that which she granted him.

Well before the cracks started to show in coverture's foundation, the law had already demonstrated that it knew how to imagine women's full legal personhood. It simply reserved that imagination for the Queen. The Queen's married subjects, the wives of the nation, were the ones left waiting to become rights-holders. The decision to exempt the Queen was not legal necessity. It was a political choice. One that teaches us how the law has the power as well as the inclination to selectively imagine a woman’s personhood depending on her status and usefulness to existing power structures.

Question: Are there any histories of queenship that particularly appeal to you? The two-bodies trope has carried through history past coverture. One journalist seemingly trying to insult Elizabeth II called both a queen and a housewife. It has persisted past the monarchy as well, with Margaret Thatcher calling herself a housewife in order to signal a political view on domesticity.

Note: The Queen wasn’t the only woman who was exempt from coverture’s rules and disability. This is the first in a series about the exceptions to coverture’s rules and what we can learn from them. Next week, feme sole traders. Subscribe so you don’t miss the excitement.

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There are many great Substackers who write about queenship, monarchy, and female power. Here’s just a small sampling of some writers to check out:

• wrote Young Queens, and has the archival expertise to tell us all kind of stories about queenship.

• has written extensively about Women of the Hundred Years War, and wars of succession.

• has a great interview with Dr Elizabeth Norton, talking about the concept of “Female Kings.”

• has a fantastic looking book coming out entitled Monarchia: A New History of the English Royal Dynasties, Through the Queens Who Built Them.

• has very entertaining work about royalty - and a new book, Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History, which looks wonderful.

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The City as a Site of Self-invention (warning: minor spoilers ahead)

At the heart of the London Falling is Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old boy from Maida Vale, who was pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to an inheritance of around $270 million. No one, including his parents, knew that Zac had this secret identity until he disappeared one day in November 2019. Soon after his body washed up on the banks of the Thames. A few years earlier, his parents had noticed that Zac was developing a deep fascination with extreme wealth. What they didn’t know was that Zac had begun speaking with a slight Russian accent and was frequenting famous clubs like Annabel’s, where he was trying to flex his supposed wealth in order to become a deal-maker. He claimed to be living in a pre-eminent luxury building, One Hyde Park, and to be connected to Roman Abramovich, the famous oligarch.

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In this new life, Zac became very involved with two men, Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma. The book’s central argument is that the two men were eager to gain access to Zac’s fortune, and Zac jumped off the balcony to escape what was about to befall him once Shamji and Sharma discovered there was no fortune to be had. While Zac’s death was ruled a suicide, the police found text messages on Sharma’s phone saying things like: “heating up knives and clearing up blood,” and “Sh*t’s about to go wrong.” So the argument is not outlandish.

Whatever prompted Zac to jump, one thing is clear: he was a “young fabulist” who took advantage of the opportunities that London offered not only to be proximate to wealth but also to infiltrate elite circles with an eye to accumulating wealth. In this sense, Zac was one in a long line of London fraudsters and fabulists, buoyed by the idea of fantasy becoming reality, using fantasy to create opportunity.1 London is a city filled with stately homes and gardens that once hosted masked balls. It is a city full of theatrical stages that have attracted people seeking both anonymity and recognition, and it has always been a center of reinvention built on newly minted fortunes.

In every generation, the fashion has looked different. But the pursuit of piles of money, ideally leading to social prestige, has been the same. The allure of spectacular wealth is the never-ending story.

The City as a Site of Wealth Washing

If London is the ground zero of self-invention, it is also fertile soil for new money, criminal wealth, and wealth washing. Front and center in the book is the wealth of the Russian oligarchs, who poured money into London, starting in the mid-2000s. The oligarchs, the story goes, turned London into a site of questionable wealth and money laundering as they bought up heritage properties in Belgravia and Hampstead, country estates in Surrey, football clubs, newspapers, and bookstore chains.

But the oligarchs are not the only financial criminals in the book. Verinder Sharma, one of the men in the apartment with Zac on his last night alive, had a criminal record that was years old and pages long. In particular, he was closely connected to Micky McAvoy, the mastermind of the notorious £26 million Brink’s-Mat gold robbery in 1983. The proceeds from that robbery were laundered through various property developments, funding the transformation of the London Docklands and Canary Wharf. This laundered money, like the oligarch money, moved through and shaped London.

Akbar Shamji, the second person in the apartment the night Zac died, was the son of Abdul Shamji, a wealthy British-Indian businessman who had fled Uganda when Idi Amin took over. Abdul Shamji made millions in various shady business ventures - while furiously fundraising for Margaret Thatcher - before being jailed for perjury in 1989. In the 1980s, debates raged in Parliament over the prevalence of financial fraud in London and Abdul Shamji was held out as an exemplar of the troubling trends. Allan Rodgers, the Labour MP for Rhondda, stated:

Fraud in the City of London, is extraordinary. It is extraordinary in moral, legal, criminal, financial and social—or perhaps I should say anti-social—terms. It is extraordinary in its scale, in the number of frauds that are perpetrated, in the audacity of the frauds that are perpetrated, and, indeed, in the treachery of the frauds that are perpetrated.

Fraud was rampant and London was becoming home to a new kind of financial crime. But, once more, what was new was very old. London, like most Western capitals, was built on financial crimes. Historically, however, they were perpetrated by the original ruling classes. For example, the United Kingdom’s financial infrastructure and foundational wealth derived from legalized systems of theft and the constant flow of wealth from British colonies. Paraphrasing Karl Marx, the capital that built England came to its shores without a birth certificate. And it landed happily in a city where it could become cleaned up and presentable. The only thing that has changed over the centuries is whose money is washing up onshore.

Does this bring to mind any good stories about reinvention and the pursuit of profit? Do you think different cities have different characters in this respect?

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