The fresh Dutch nest of new Netherland provided exceptional legal rights to widows
Here a woman endured so you’re able to inherit and you may own their husband’s whole property having her very own play with otherwise profit. If she remarried she had been legally titled in order to half of exactly what is their. It got profound implications as the good widow you’ll enable by herself, cash in on the fresh new land, or even start her own team. Even after the brand new English takeover of new Netherland into the 1664, Dutch custom governed personal and you may courtroom norms for women inside region (pick Part 6). Because of Dutch way of life you to called for women as company couples and their husbands, women in Brand new Netherland enjoyed significantly more liberty than just ladies in almost every other territories. Regardless if nonetheless regarded as subordinate, a woman you will definitely very own her very own organization, possess an inheritance equivalent to regarding their brothers, sue on the individual account, to make a may making property to help you whoever she picked. Inside acute cases she could even sue her very own husband within the courtroom. However, New Netherland female prospered at the a much higher rates than simply its counterparts on rest of the territories.
Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer
Maria van Cortlandt van Rensselaer is actually an upper-group housewife exactly who stayed in brand new Dutch colony of brand new Amsterdam. When their spouse died she turned new overseer out of their family’s estate, Rensselaerswyck, with the intention that their own pupils would have a heredity. Van Rensselaer spent my youth in the customs of seventeenth-century women in the netherlands, who were sensed the freest into the European countries. So it independence is caused by its being educated and you will educated to handle domestic membership and control your family company if they have been ever widowed.