The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality, Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac, translated by Juliette Rogers

Extract

The first time I read this book, I came away feeling quite hopeful—or not unhopeful—about law. Yes, the book showed the existence of a profound wealth gap between women and men. Yes, the book showed how the ways in which money and property are arranged within families perpetuate this gap and thereby disadvantage women. And yes, the book showed how law is implicated in the construction of these arrangements, even where, as in the case of France (the book’s point of focus), the legal framework in question is ‘formally egalitarian’ (p70). But there was nevertheless a sense, running through my reading at least, that whereas the question that the authors were posing here was about how this was all possible, and whereas their analysis showed how law was involved in the rendering of it possible, there was some potential for law here, some way in which law could be engaged in rethinking the ways of being and living that it had, on the authors’ analysis, been implicated in. It wasn’t clear, exactly, what this could involve, or the degree to which the answer—to the extent that there could be an answer—could lie solely within law. But insofar as the analysis presented in the book demonstrated the sheer capacity of law, this was a live capacity. If only, the sense was, we could find a way of shifting things within the legal framework, a way of challenging the assumptions and worldviews embedded within that legal framework, a way of improving understanding of that framework. If only.