A Woman’s Place is on the Land Register

Why working on land rights changed how I saw the ground under my feet

Hello friends,

Thank you for being a part of this community. It is a place to share experiences that connect our personal stories to our collective stories. Our inner journeys to outer journeys and our transformations to bigger global change.

I write about the systems we live in through the lens of my personal and professional experiences of twenty years working in the aid sector.

I hope my stories might add some texture to these topics and help connect your lived experiences to our global narrative. And ultimately - feel a bit less alone.

Welcome.

And onto this week’s story…

In my work as a land and gender expert, I used to write papers about women farmers’ land ownership and decision-making power over resources.

I knew from research the overwhelming benefits of land ownership for women. For example, owning land makes women less vulnerable to domestic violence and marital rape, better able to protect their health and more empowered to provide for their children. Land ownership has a specific financial potential in agricultural societies but it also has a value in other settings.

In a world of TikTok influence and social media, power often seems to lie in the intangible. But through working on resources, I have seen the many ways in which it lies in what we can see and touch.

A woman with control over resources is a woman who can say no, who can stand up for herself, who can set boundaries because she is not dependent on someone to provide her basic needs.

This made a lot of sense in rural settings, yet when I declared myself, at the age of 37, finally, a landowner, I felt a bit ridiculous. I realised I had spent a lot of time advocating for other women’s resources without seeking out resources of my own.

I also recognised, that as a single woman, working in the charity sector it had taken me almost 20 years of savings plus a mortgage to be able to have the resources to buy a home. And even then I felt lucky and privileged to have that potential.

When I look back on all the years I did not have a place of my own, I also see the ways that this made me vulnerable. Like the time I had moved from a country and a flat I had called home for over five years, for a boyfriend - who unceremoniously kicked me out three months later, with no warning. He left me confused, heartbroken and with no place to live.

So, I had to move back to my home country and my parents’ suburban home in my thirties as I did not have anywhere else to go. I recognised I was lucky to have a family still willing to house me while I got back on my feet, but it was hard to feel like an empowered adult when I had to resort to my childhood bedroom as my primary place to live.

I have dealt with tricky landlords the world over, from the disinterested to the creepy men who turned up unannounced to lecture me about the sort of person I was, in countries where there was no legal reason they could not. I lived in new builds in back alleys of expanding metropolises, had windows overlooking pagodas and resided in tiny studios with the constant roaring of traffic beneath me.

I stayed for six months in a small one-room house in Nicaragua with an open-air kitchen and bathroom which flooded when it rained and had such a terrible termite problem that tiny pieces of wood fell from the roof onto my pillow every night. I occupied a flat overlooking the Sacre Coeur, where the live-in female landlord walked around naked, and a large apartment in a suburb of Cairo, where all the other bedrooms were empty due to the Arab Spring.

All these sorts of places I had called home. I stayed in them sometimes for long periods and they felt like mine, but I could not knock holes in their walls, or live in them without the knowledge that one day I would have to leave.

The view from my flat in Yangon. I loved looking out at this pagoda and neighbouring pigeons.

So when I bought my own home, I finally felt the power and potential of resource ownership. I loved the fact that I had achieved it alone by following my own circuitous career path. I felt triumphant when I made the bank transfer. Terrified when I picked up the keys. Incredibly proud when my name went on the Scottish Land Register.

There is a subtle stability which comes from looking around a space and knowing it is yours. Knowing you can knock down a wall, hammer a nail in a door or paint the bathroom pink without having to worry about getting anyone’s permission. You can shape your space in your way and close the door to anyone you don’t want there - already both revolutionary acts for many women around the world. Especially if it has taken you almost twenty working years to be able to afford yourself those boundaries.

And owning my place reminds me of the many ways that the earth under our feet takes on a political shape and more than that, it shows us the shape of power.

Land governance is not about the earth and farming. It’s about decision-making power within our current systems over the essentials we need as humans - energy, water, food, minerals. It’s about the ways having something tangible can provide a groundedness for the other decisions you make.

And in societies where our romantic relationships are still largely agreed upon within the systems of patriarchy, in which women are still largely taught to seek love over owning resources and building wealth; owning a home expands our freedoms - to say no, to speak freely, to make choices.

Because land is more solid than salary, it is rooted. It does not require a boss or a man to like you. You do not need to compromise to maintain your land rights. The ground cannot be pulled out from under a woman’s feet when she owns that ground herself.

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As a final aside, research shows that many witches who were persecuted in Scotland were land owners. Because there is nothing like women’s tangible control over resources to terrify the status quo.

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