Why People Love Things

Or why property is so meaningful

I like to think of estate planning as matching a person’s things with the people in their life- a plan for who gets what. It should be a simple matching game, but in reality, it can be difficult because people have deep and often complicated feelings about the things they own. That is to say, personhood and property are intimately entwined in ways that make inheritance both incredibly meaningful and also emotionally fraught.

That powerful connections exist between people and their property is predictable and perhaps inevitable. As people have drinks with friends in their living rooms or make breakfast for the family in their kitchens, they are surrounded by and in relationship with various objects: coffee mugs, the kitchen table, a collection of porcelain figurines, a painting hanging over the fireplace, and even the home itself. People acquire and care for things, and the things, in turn, impart identity to the people who own and use them.

Sir William Blackstone, a foundational figure in the development of English law, acknowledged the grip of property on the imagination, stating: “There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property” (Commentaries, 1765). Another expert in the realm of describing property, Henry James, had his character Madame Merle make this speech in The Portrait of a Lady:

[E]very human being has his shell and . . . There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances.… I’ve a great respect for THINGS! . . . one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps— these things are all very expressive.

[for more on Henry James, personhood, and property, check out this article of mine].

Property makes people and families who they are, and this is why people care so deeply about who gets their things. This is why my grandmother wrote the names of the people she wanted to inherit her things on pieces of masking tape and stuck the pieces of tape to every item in the house. This is also why people are disappointed when their children don’t want their things, which happens all the time and is one of the reasons we have estate sales (and maybe even Swedish death cleaning).

Identification with property and care for the legacy it creates undoubtedly pertains in the context of people with abundant property. But the same holds true for people who have little, in that they still want to ensure that their family property - recipe cards, a collection of work tools, or photo albums - continue to bind generations. Moreover, this phenomenon of property as personhood is something that rang true, historically, for people who were stripped of property rights and even for those who were treated as property themselves.

Whether or not a married woman could write a will in England or the United States before the enactment of the Married Women’s Property Acts at the end of the nineteenth century was an open and contested legal question [I’ve written about that here]. Most of a married woman’s property automatically belonged to her husband and therefore she had nothing to leave through a will, and it was also not clear she had the legal right to create such a document without the consent of her husband. Nevertheless, married women wrote wills and these wills were often upheld, particularly when they disposed primarily of her “paraphernalia,” including jewelry, clothing, and other personal effects. (For the greatest and perhaps only novel about whether a necklace is a family heirloom, a gift, or a woman’s paraphernalia, please read Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds).

In the American South, before the end of the Civil War and slavery laws, enslaved men and women were not only prohibited from owning property but were treated as personal property and included in wills and other transfers of property. Enslaved men and women nevertheless acquired, preserved, and passed down property outside of the legal system. Dylan Penningroth, a scholar of Black history and property ownership, has written: “Part of property’s value for slaves, apart from its capacity to be used or consumed, lay in the social relationships that it embodied . . . By bequeathing property, slaves over and over again defined not only what belonged to them but also who.” Carving out the right to create and control inheritances without legal sanction was both an assertion of family identity and belonging (since the law barred enslaved people from creating legal family structures) as well as political resistance.

Disentangling people from the things that surround and sustain them is mindful work and requires an understanding of both the meaning that individual items hold for the person as well as what importance the person places on ownership more generally. Every case is fact specific and historically contingent, but all cases point to the central role of property in creating personhood.