Yeah, I only really know from post-1789 and the Napoleonic code, but it seems non-aristo women could hold property and also vote in certain regions under the Ancien Régime: this article suggests women did so the Aquitaine, Champagne, Toulouse and the Flanders regions, with respect to feudal custom’s succession rules.
Further Ancien Régime refs for this period re a widow's legal capacity to hold her late spouse's property and run his business: (from this article on the interesting succession case of Baudon (re: succession to matrimonial assets): Melish, Jacob, “The Power of Wives: Managing Money and Men in the Family Businesses of Old Regime Paris,” in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Hafter, Daryl M. and Kushner, Nina (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); see also Jane McLeod, “Printer Widows and the State in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Women and Work, 113–29.
(Sidebar: on the latter ref, it seems widows were particularly active in the French printing business! See wiki and refs.)
no subject
Further Ancien Régime refs for this period re a widow's legal capacity to hold her late spouse's property and run his business: (from this article on the interesting succession case of Baudon (re: succession to matrimonial assets):
Melish, Jacob, “The Power of Wives: Managing Money and Men in the Family Businesses of Old Regime Paris,” in Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Hafter, Daryl M. and Kushner, Nina (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); see also Jane McLeod, “Printer Widows and the State in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Women and Work, 113–29.
(Sidebar: on the latter ref, it seems widows were particularly active in the French printing business! See wiki and refs.)
Further material on succession and property in aristo marriage contracts and regional customary laws: this very Paris-centric article circa 1500s to early 1700s.