The fate of a union has always been determined by its particular circumstance. Romantic ideals are a point of privilege and access, and not all post-Enlightenment women have been entitled to the careful consideration of potential mates. As the real-life counterparts to Austen’s nineteenth-century heroines were contemplating pragmatism and love in marriage, for example, enslaved Black people in the southern United States were forbidden legal marriage at all. An estimated two out of every five informal slave marriages were broken up when one spouse was sold off to another plantation; entire generations of families were torn apart, reconstituted, and broken again. Even when accounting for the concentration of Anglo-American and British case studies I’ve referenced, it’s critical to recognize the roles race and class each play in the basic existential freedoms of choice in all areas of life.
Every partnership must contend with the issue of logistics. Even among the more privileged denizens of the West at the turn of the nineteenth century, not everyone lived in a community that included a justice of the peace or a law clerk. Among rural white settlers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, common-law marriages were not uncommon workarounds for a lack of clerical or financial access to proper ceremonial pomp. In the UK, the Marriage Act of 1753 prohibited couples from pursuing clandestine marriages that skirted the fees required for legal marriage licences, which prompted many poorer Britons to follow suit in opting for unmarried cohabitation. And across social strata, women had fewer fundamental rights than were generally afforded men, and even these were typically further eroded when they became wives.
Theoretically, unmarried white women in the Anglo world could, ironically, enjoy freedoms of property ownership throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This holdout of ‘coverture,’ a thirteenth-century English common law, recognized single adult women as sole legal entities, but only until they were wed. Upon marriage, they forfeited their lawful personhood and became, in the eyes of Church and law, an extension of their husbands’ persons. Under coverture, a woman’s rights were literally covered by those of her husband. While it’s tempting to describe historical marriage as husband’s de facto ownership of wife, it might be more accurate to call it erasure. It is a perhaps unpleasant truth that the continued practice of women taking their husband’s surnames upon marriage can also trace its origins to coverture, a symbolic remnant of dark-age convention we’ve yet to collectively shake.
Coverture was observed in both the ‘old’ world and the new. In the continental United States of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a married woman might be entitled to own property depending on where she lived and the circumstances of her husband. As early as 1771, women in the then-Province of Pennsylvania were allowed to own property in their own names, but only if their spouses were somehow unable to manage it themselves. The later Married Women’s Property Act, passed in New York in 1848, established that a single woman’s property could remain lawfully hers even after marriage, and that she could also obtain her own earnings and gifts as a wife. Over the following decade, a majority of states would pass similar statutes.
Upper Canada (what is now Ontario) established a property rights act for married women in 1859, beating the UK by eleven years. When Britain finally did pass its Married Women’s Property Act in 1870, critics worried that the stride toward a more equal treatment of men and women – even if limited to the sole regard of property entitlement – would wreak havoc within marriages. In fact, it wasn’t until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 that the former act would be revised to recognize English husbands and wives as independent legal entities.
It’s easy to understand why women of limited means would have chosen to marry, given few alternate avenues for livelihood. But why would a woman of a property-owning class opt to surrender her independence in exchange for a husband? One major impetus was the social cost of spinsterhood, whose stigmatization grew in direct correlation with the post-Enlightenment glorification of marriage. Stephanie Coontz writes that the word spinster was ‘originally an honorable term reserved for a woman who spun yarn, [which] by the 1600s … had come to mean any woman who was not married.’ A century later, the word took on connotation closer to the negative one it presently has. ‘[T]he flip side,’ Coontz explains, ‘of the new reverence accorded to wives.’
And that reverence was real. With the emergence of a companionate, affectionate marriage ideal came increased social pressure for women to endeavour upon the project of cheerful domesticity. Marriage and the family became recoded as arenas for women’s spiritual actualization, the locus for pure fulfillment as opposed to a plane of existence largely grounded in duty. In a sense, post-Enlightenment wifehood took on the set of signifiers we still see reinforced by a certain style of mommy blog and lifestyle Instagram account in the twenty-first century. Here, a life initiated in an unanaesthetized home birth becomes told for a consuming public through a series of photogenic vignettes that establish a simulacra of maternal serenity.
The likeliest reason for free, propertied women’s persistence in marrying is also the least surprising: throughout history, women had been brought up to believe that their primary destiny in secular life was to become a wife and mother. A woman’s selfhood had always been defined in relation to others. In the absence of a husband, what might her existence even mean?
And besides, there was also the matter of sex. The moral indignation reserved for unmarried women caught in a man’s carnal snares was ruinous, especially if the indiscretion produced a child. Many of these women wound up in asylums or labour homes under the guise of religious charity, effectively plucked from society and stained for life. Just a year before scandalously having her own child out of wedlock, Mary Wollstonecraft lambasted the attitudes of the era in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). ‘Still, highly as I respect marriage, as the foundation of almost every social virtue, I cannot avoid feeling the most lively compassion for those unfortunate females who are broken off from society, and by one error torn from all those affections and relationships that improve the heart and mind,’ Wollstonecraft wrote. She thought this unfair; a young woman caught off guard by a man’s advances might genuinely believe herself to be in love.
Though spared the so-called charity reserved for a ‘ruined’ woman, a miserably married woman’s fate was hardly any better. Until the mid-nineteenth century, divorce was unheard of among ordinary people, and women were expected to endure adultery, emotional mistreatment, and even some measure of physical abuse as part of the contract of marital obedience.
In the UK, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 finally institutionalized the country’s first court tasked with hearing divorce cases in the event of, as its title stated, a cause worthy of dissolution. But it was much easier for men to obtain divorces than it was for women. The Act entitled men to file for divorce solely on the grounds of a wife’s adultery; women, on the other hand, had to prove that their husbands had committed adultery in addition to bigamy, incest, cruelty, or desertion. The Canadian historian Elizabeth Abbott writes that the effect of the new UK law was a fifty-fold increase in divorce. Yet some 600,000 women petitioned Queen Victoria against it, objecting both to the gendered double standard it perpetuated and to its violation of the ‘indissoluble marriage to which we have adhered since England was England.’ Wanting an unbreakable marriage was undoubtedly driven in large part by the culture’s sanctification of the institution, but a woman’s inability to inherit her own property – or keep any of her husband’s, in the event of a divorce – certainly didn’t hurt in fostering the desire to remove any lingering trace of a simple marital exit.
In the US, few states recognized cruelty as grounds for a divorce prior to 1840. Even then, what constituted marital cruelty was open to legal interpretation. American historian Robert L. Griswold writes that ‘cruelty’ as grounds for divorce was generally understood to encompass either physical violence or the threat thereof, but records show that many women in both nineteenth-century America and England were denied divorces despite providing compelling evidence of physical assault or verbal abuse – or, in some instances, both. In 1836, the high court of New Hampshire refused to grant a woman divorce on the grounds of her ‘high, bold, masculine spirit … not always ready to submit, even to the legitimate authority of her husband.’ The woman’s husband had locked her in a cellar and beaten her with a horse whip while spitting obscenities. The court reasoned that her own unwifely behaviour had brought this treatment on, and it was up to her to improve her situation.
It wasn’t until the latter half of the nineteenth century that legal interpretations of cruelty were expanded to encompass less tangible forms of mistreatment, as the rise of women’s rights movements dovetailed with the widespread idealization of love-marriage. By 1860 most states granted wives a divorce from habitually drunken husbands. And by the 1880s, Griswold writes, mental suffering became accepted as adequate grounds for divorce – the direct result of a shift in understanding of the interplay between family values, gender roles, social class, and emotional well-being.
The courts’ new-found recognition of mental anguish was in keeping with the bourgeois concerns of the day and, in turn, ongoing debates over the woman’s role in an increasingly secularized, urbanized, and industrialized society. The nineteenth century had given rise to a new interest in the relationship between the mind and body, typically understood as ‘neurasthenia’ in men and ‘hysteria’ in women. Unsurprisingly, the interpretation of these respective conditions treated the former as a symptom of male intellect and the latter, a consequence of women’s efforts to assert greater agency than their natures had allotted.
By the end of the century, rising reports of hysteria were accepted as by-products of a growing drive toward gender equality that encompassed the escalating women’s suffrage movement. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot has been dubbed ‘the Napoleon of neuroses’ for his pioneering research that offered scientific grounding for the link between the brain and emotional affliction, which would hugely influence the early work of Sigmund Freud. But the primacy of emotional well-being remained a position of privilege, afforded only to women whose immediate material needs were attended to.
Even as it became more widely accepted for women to file for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty, lower- and middle-class women did not necessarily make sympathetic plaintiffs in the eyes of a justice system that favoured men, nor a society that regarded poverty as a symptom of moral weakness. And in every socio-economic class, women had fewer outside work opportunities than their male counterparts, for which they were also paid far less. Without an independent financial safety net or relatives who would take them in, a woman could easily be damned to desperation if separated from a husband. A divorce suit might be filed as a last resort for financial support, but the decision threatened a major social cost.
One by-product of the elevation of wives and mothers was that the stigma attached to a woman’s decision to divorce could be extreme. Even early feminists attending the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, weren’t totally on-board with the idea of making marriages easier to dissolve, according to women’s studies scholar Joyce W. Warren. Many believed that adopting the issue as a cause would present as anti-family and hinder the suffrage movement; others were put off by the secularization of marriage, which would reposition spousehood as just a contract, as opposed to a sacramental bond.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1884 article ‘The Need of Liberal Divorce Laws’ was likely intended to win over her fellow feminists as much as the general public. ‘Divorce is not the foe of marriage,’ wrote Stanton. ‘Adultery, intemperance, licentiousness are its foes. One might as well speak of medicine as the foe of health.’ Stanton had a point, and others were catching on. Despite the social and economic impetus to remain unhappily married, rates of divorce rose exponentially from the middle of the nineteenth century into the second decade of the twentieth – a legally upheld expression of individual agency, afforded those who the courts saw as people. Then and now, the freedom to make relationship decisions was not a privilege within all women’s grasp.