Women acquired property through the practice of the dowry--an institution which recognized women's weak economic position in society. The main purpose of a home as dowry was for a widow to maintain a household separate from her parents or siblings. A dowry remained the property of the married woman although her husband controlled it. If widowed, she did not have to depend upon her husband’s legatees and their possible largess.
A dowry from a St. Augustine family might hasten a daughter's marriage to an immigrating soldier, who, although landless, brought a soldier's pay to the union. As for brides' preferences, Iberian birth carried status throughout the Spanish New World. After 1680, marriage to a local man could mean financial uncertainty as the governor mustered out native-born soldiers.
St. Augustine's society in the 1600s and 1700s, where men arrived and women stayed generation after generation, exhibited the pattern of uxorlocality or matrilocality. Anthropologists have observed these practices among pre-modern societies as a response to in-migration and external warfare.
St. Augustine's differences from other Atlantic coast settlements did not lie just in its Iberian roots and legal traditions. Florida did not develop an agricultural or export-based economy. Spanish Florida was a service-based, cash-based economy. The money that arrived to support the military establishment was externally generated beyond the Florida colony.
Where land was perceived as a lesser source of wealth, women achieved a more nearly equal claim to land. St. Augustine's residents adapted the Iberian tradition of the dowry to that reality.