oursin | Entries tagged with divorce

Brain’s sex differences are subtle and contradictory, large MRI study finds:

But even apparently null results, as in the current study, are useful, Sanchís Segura says, “because it’s important to talk about when men and women are similar” in a field that is biased toward finding bias. For example, the way brain activation mapped onto behavior was largely the same for men and women, the new study found.
“You can prove that a difference exists, but you cannot prove that a difference doesn’t exist,” she says. “You can put into PubMed, ‘sex differences,’ and you will have thousands of papers, but what if I want to look for the absence of differences? We don’t even have a word.”

Also about finding what you want to see there:

No evidence for ‘witches’ marks’ claims at old English buildings, historian says:

Over the years, English Heritage and Historic England have claimed to have identified large numbers of “witches’ marks” or “ritual protection symbols” on the walls of historic buildings, including medieval churches and houses.
Now a leading architectural historian has said there is “absolutely no evidence” that these marks have anything to do with witches or any “mystical meanings”.
Daisy wheels, or hexafoils, are among symbols that are no more than the marks of stonemasons who worked on those buildings, according to Jennifer Alexander, a professor of architectural history at Warwick University and author of a new study.

This one is a bit more niche, in that I had not actually come across it, but it resonates with other cases where there is A much-circulated Story which based on Something Somebody Told Someone based on their vague recollections or something they thought they saw, or, in fact, conflating several different stories....

What Do You Do with a Phantom Sailor Suit? A New Note with Some "New" Old Evidence on Cornell Woolrich, the Blackton Sisters and the Infamous Story of the Sex Diary

I had some vague knowledge of Woolrich, but pretty much only as 'er, wrote noir novels in the 30s or thereabouts? some of them became movies???'

I'm also slightly sceptical of the 'unconsummated marriage' alternative narrative simply because if you realised you had made A Dreadful Mistake this was probably an easy out via annulment? (will concede that I have personally written scholarly article deconstructing a famous allegedly non-consummated marriage narrative in the light of the British divorce laws of the early C20th)

But the whole 'create sensationalist account on basis of I think this happened/I made it all up' is not unfamiliar to moi.

Anyway, I was dipping in again to the Violet Hunt Tales of the Uneasy and in 'The Operation' there is the backstory where a man's first wife -

had smoothed and made easy the path of divorce for the man she loved.... full of zeal to give him his freedom. It was hardly human, so the woman who had profited by her action thought, and certainly not very womanly. Florence could not imagine herself allowing a cold business-like lawyer to dictate her a letter bidding Joe come back to her herewith; a summons intended, of course, for ultimate publication. It disgusted Florence, this horrible business of sueing for restitution of conjugal rights!

Only a divorce-law nerd like moi would probably be able to decode this?

This was the cleanest way a woman could get quit of a husband pre 1923 - he had of course to be adulterous (or appear to have been) and refusing to restitute conjugal rights counted as desertion.

Otherwise she had to prove cruelty (which could include knowing infection with a loathsome disease) or that he was guilty of a sexual crime (rape, sodomy, incest....).

But in a situation where the man had, presumably, already run off with Another Woman, having to go through that legal rigmarole of asking him to come back so that he could refuse and be legally deserting does strike one as a very chagrining procedure.

Less than half the male population in England and Wales was working in agriculture by the C18th, well before the Industrial Revolution: How important was agriculture before and during the Industrial Revolution? (Cue my usual rant about dodgy nostalgic visions of The People of England as Rural Peasantry, quite possibly tugging their forelocks.) Okay, it varied by region, and some could be high, while others, e.g. mining areas and some cities, were low. But in comparison to most other parts of Europe, 'the shift out of agriculture in England began 200-300 years earlier'.

***

This 1630 English Bible has an array of evidence of women’s book ownership:

“Joan Woottem” has signed her name below the message: “November ye 21st 1733 / my sister [?] gaue / mee this book.” Unfortunately, her sister’s name is difficult to make out due to the ink stains and scribbled. Joan used the rest of the page to jot down a recipe “for a pain or a strain” that requires several ingredients such as sack, oil of Exeter, St. Johns Wort, and other oils.

***

This is fascinating, but I'm not sure it counts as mysterious, exactly - possibly the Agatha Christie connection is responsible for that: The Mysterious Affair of Adultery in the Divorce Court. This duo of cases worked out so neatly I am inclined to suspect that there was a certain amount of behind-the-scenes collusion - the legalistic 'desertion' set-up suggests this to me.

***

This is also fascinating, and rather more unexpected: No “Sane” Person Would Have Any Idea’: Patients’ Involvement in Late Nineteenth-century British Asylum Psychiatry:

Harding was a voluntary patient throughout his asylum stay; Haigh was legally certified as insane, but his relationship with his physicians led to later voluntary admissions and eventually a re-evaluation of his legal status. I argue that it is this unique (ambiguous) status that provided them both with a unique place within the asylum’s social order. By presenting an original angle that contradicts classic views on doctor–patient relationships, this facet of late-Victorian asylumdom also sheds new light on classic historiographical narratives. Both Haigh and Harding seemingly accepted certain elements of the patient role while rejecting others; both also took on additional identities and even contributed to medical debates over the ways in which madness could be defined and represented. In these particular cases, the patient’s view thus sits between the professionalised medical view and lay conceptualisations of madness.

The life and adventures of Toby, the Sapient Pig:

There had been a previous wave of performing pigs in the late 18th century, but something about Toby appears to have particularly gripped the public imagination. Verses were written comparing him favourably to the greatest actors of the day, like Edmund Kean, and ‘Toby’ quickly became the generic name for all of his porcine competitors. His fame was such that, boasting he was ‘the first of my race that ever wielded the pen’ (an earlier literary pig had merely dictated its memoirs), Toby even wrote his own autobiography, The life and adventures of Toby, the sapient pig: with his opinions on men and manners. Written by himself (London, c. 1817).

The John Johnson Collection of Ephemera is absolutely fabulous.

***

More critical demography from the Cambridge Population people: Changing fertility and timing of motherhood in England and Wales – a long view:

In fact, before the fertility transition, high levels of fertility were accompanied by high average ages at childbirth, and demographers in the 1960s thought that previous fertility decline would have been closely accompanied by a decline in the average age of childbirth. The reality was rather more complex, as shown in the graph below.

Massive amounts of It's All More Complicated.

***

Another fascinating case uncovered by the Divorce Court Project: Deafness in the Divorce Court:

It is no exaggeration to say that the education that Mary Ann received at YIDD [Yorkshire Institute for the Deaf and Dumb], together with her training as a dressmaker saved her life. Being literate enabled Mary Ann to communicate the appalling details of her marriage to William [also Deaf] with her solicitor in Sheffield, and her ability to pick up a needle and earn her own living enabled her to meet the criteria for an Order of Protection.

***

Through a Herne’s Eye: On Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Five Novels”: the editor on editing this volume of the Library of America edition of her works.

***

Colouring flowers: books, art, and experiment in the household of Margery and Henry Power:

From the 1650s, this couple worked in tandem to enhance their understanding of the vegetable world through various paper technologies, from books, paper slips and recipe notebooks to Margery's drawing album and Henry's published Experimental Philosophy. Focusing on Margery's practice of hand-colouring flower books, her copied and original drawings of flowers and her experimental production of ink, we argue that Margery's sensibility towards colour was crucial to Henry's microscopic observations of plants. Even if Margery's sophisticated knowledge of plants never left the household, we argue that her contribution was nevertheless crucial to the observation and representation of plants within the community of experimental philosophy. In this way, our article highlights the importance of female artists within the history of scientific observation, the use of books and paperwork in the botanical disciplines, and the relationship between household science and experimental philosophy.

I was aware of the role played by the wives of later scientists as crucial to their work, and this only slightly predates the work of Maria Sibylla Merian, noted botanical and entomological artist in her own right.

I find the work this project is doing on matrimonial law very exciting, and also how they are digging way beyond the big scandalous divorce cases to the quotidien: The Most Radical Legislation of the Nineteenth Century: ‘Wherefore She Prays for an Order for the Protection of her Earnings and Property’ (though I'm now wondering what happened in 1893, perhaps that is an episode Still to Come).

***

This is almost a reverse case: a woman scientist who was forced to conceal that she was married in order to keep on working: The secret life of Miss Ruby Payne-Scott:

Until the amendment of the Public Service Act in November 1966, women employed in the Australian Public Service were required to resign upon marriage. Married women were obliged to accept temporary positions with poor career prospects and no entitlements. Like countless other women, the scientist hid her marriage. When her six-year secret was finally exposed in 1950, she was forced to retire as a permanent staffer and was reinstated on a temporary basis. Never one to mince words, Ruby told the CSIRO:
Personally I feel no legal or moral obligation to have taken any other action than I have in making my marriage known… the present procedure with regard to married women… seems to go far beyond the simple statement in the Act … [it] is ridiculous and can lead to ridiculous results.

I wonder a bit if the suspicions over her Communist and feminist affiliations were in the mix.

***

A different perspective on declining population and who it is who are not having children (wo wo deth of civ etc etc): Recent research has found that it’s more likely to be men who aren’t able to have children even if they want them: 'Men’s role in declining birth rates is often overlooked, says Vincent Straub, who studies men’s health and fertility at the University of Oxford'.

***

Some recent offerings from the Cambridge Population History People: To the manor bound: Serfdom in Europe; What kept the rich and the poor apart in industrial Manchester?

***

This one should probably have featured in my post earlier this week: ‘An Absurd Rage for Public Speaking’: An Abolitionist Fair Orator in the London Debating Societies, 1788–1791

***

Actually, duckie, I think the term here would be 'kept woman', and your friends actually pick up on that: I’m a ‘trad wife’ in a happy marriage. How can I get my friends to accept me for who I am?. Is this spooky or what?

One night I ended up at a party with people I didn’t know and someone slipped something in my drink and I lost all memory until the next morning when I woke up on the sofa in a strange man’s apartment. He had rescued me and taken me to his place. I didn’t leave his flat for three months, except to be taken out to dinner and sent off to a gym to get back in shape.

And what exactly does she do apart from having lovely holidays that could form topics of conversation, hmmmm?

What I read

Finished Where is Anybody, reliable mixture as usual, possibly (?) winding up that specific series.

Ruth Derham, Bertrand's Brother: The Marriages, Morals and Misdemeanours of Frank, 2nd Earl Russell (2021), about which I was somewhat underwhelmed. Not entirely taken by the style. A great deal of the book is taken up with a blow by blow account of the details of the matrimonial discord and consequent legal wrangling of his first marriage - ending in his being tried by his peers in the House of Lord for bigamy and sent down for it (dodgy US divorce and remarriage). While Frank Russell was pro several Good Causes, like divorce law reform, and eventually sat on the Labour benches in the Lords, one gets the feeling that even back then, he was tending to be a 'please could he not be on our side' kind of bloke because he was bound to be contrary. (Unlike all Marie Stopes' other friends, he was positively encouraging her to sue for libel, he was so that kind of guy.)

While I think I'd still score him as way less noxious than the Marquess of Queensberry, I think the author is perhaps a bit too inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and cut him slack. She clearly has a bit of a hate on for Elizabeth von Arnim (wife no 3). She's also evasive and ill-informed about the cocaine issue - both bios of Elizabeth I've read suggest coke was An Issue. Derham glides over this a bit and also doesn't realise that it was not an illegal drug at the time, there were lots of preparations readily available containing it even if you weren't bopping off to Boho haunts for a fix. (Went to v good online seminar on subject yesterday.)

For a bit of a break re-read (after many years) a couple of Robert Barnards: The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (Charlie Peace, #6) (1998), which I felt was a bit reworking certain themes from earlier work; and The Skeleton in the Grass (1988), which is the 1930s one.

On the go

Jill Schary Robinson, Come Home Canyon (2023), which is not quite grabbing me with forward momentum. Partly I think it's going over lightly fictionalised some stuff about her parents and Hollywood that already came up in somewhat different form in Go Find Out, and partly it's Not Like Her Earlier Work.

Up Next

?The new Literary Review?.

(Okay, my lovely dearios, you already know I am a matrimonial law geek, and this is REVELATION)

Introduction, free online to Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales:‘For Wives Alone'

And this is cool revelation of an underexamined and underappreciated clause of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which enabled deserted wives to go to a magistrate's court, where for a modest sum, they could be given the right to control their own property and do business in their own name.

Which also has further implications for the study of women as small business people and economic operators.

But what is absolutely ADORABLE and PRAISEWORTHY, particularly when we see so much lack of credit-giving to precursors and forebears, is that the author tracked down the unpublished work of Olive Anderson, and credits her as joint author, because a lot of it was fairly far advanced, and her own work is actually coming at the subject from a different angle, and together they are even greater.

Thinking back through our foremothers.

A little while ago I was expatiating upon the assumption that In Ye Past Tymez most people stayed positively rooted to Their Native Soil and waxing somewhat sceptical, and behold, I find someone has Done The Research, or at least, Some Research, and finds that early modern people were moving about a lot more than one might suppose, okay, to and fro from where they lived rather than engaging in long distance roaming or peripatetic lives, but even so, seeing something of life elsewhere:

Using legal records: Everyday Travel in Early Modern England:

Going ‘abroad’ – meaning to leave the place you called home – was commonplace in early modern England. Some people were migratory, making more permanent moves to pastures new. Court records capture the migrant in droves: almost two thirds of church court witnesses in the south and west of England had moved at least once in their lives, mirroring patterns found elsewhere by Peter Laslett[4]. Others were semi-migratory or even itinerant, like Thomas Hanwood (more on him later). But many more still were mobile like Joanna King’s servants, travelling back and forth (to market, to work, to visit family) between their homes and sometimes quite distant places. It’s these quotidian movements that took people outside their parish of residence that have caught my attention.

The paper trail left by all sorts of litigation and offences – adultery cases, litigation over wills, defamation disputes, and indictments for theft – documents these ordinary journeys. The journey made by Joanna King’s servants appears because Joanna’s household economy was placed under scrutiny in a tithe dispute that year. But some movement turns up more incidentally: journeys to work are detailed as an explanation for why a witness was in a particular place at a particular time, for example. In using legal records, we have to be sensitive to the possibility that witnesses might distort the historical record. But handled with care, evidence of this kind allows us to write a history of mobile lives that encompasses men, women, and children across the age spectrum and from the poorest to richest strata of society.
....
[E]arly modern people were routinely making journeys: people were on the move all the time. Court records showcase roads and waterways bustling with life, travellers piled into beds in inns and taverns on stop-overs, and well-trodden routes established by both custom and tracks in the landscape.

***

More on what can be found in early modern legal records (and the frustration of what can't): highly unusual case of an apparent intersex person, 1522, in a case suing for nullity of marriage in the Consistory (ecclesiastical) court.

[T]he Consistory court judge ordered examinations by five different midwives – the gynecological experts of early sixteenth-century England.... All five midwives testified, in some anatomical detail, that Margaret had both a vagina and a penis, though four said that the vagina was too small to allow a man’s penis to penetrate. All described the penis as small, about the length of a thumb. The testimony has much fascinating detail about the practice, knowledge, and acknowledged experience of the midwives themselves: they were expert witnesses in the Consistory court appointed by the judge, a rare instance in medieval English legal culture both of women acting in an official capacity in a court and of the recognition of women’s learned expertise.
....
Margaret herself denied the first four midwives’ judgment that she was unable to have sexual intercourse: in her own response to Christopher’s claims on 6 Sept. (predating the first set of midwives’ examinations), she said that they had frequently had sexual intercourse, though she acknowledged that she had a certain “deformity in the secret parts of her body.” Even after the midwives gave their opinions that it was not possible for her to have had vaginal intercourse, she brought forth another expert opinion from midwife Joan Karter that countered what the previous midwives had said.

***

Further on issues of matrimony, this is a generally very chewy piece by Barbara Taylor on E. P. Thompson and the ‘Woman Problem’ in relation to his famous study on the making of the working class.

What particularly intrigued me was the account of the ding-dong between Thompson and Raphael Samuel over wife-sale and what it implied about the relations of the sexes among the poor in afore times:

Samuel published a piece in History Workshop Journal in which he criticised Thompson’s famous essay ‘The Sale of Wives’. A ‘form of unofficial divorce’ when it was unobtainable by all but the very wealthy, wife selling occurred in England from the seventeenth century and continued into the early twentieth century, although by then incidences were very rare. Thompson represented this public auction of a wife to the highest bidder as ‘usually by mutual consent, leavened by a rough plebeian humour’. Samuel was sharp: ‘He might as plausibly have situated it in relation to wife-beating, or (taking a cue from classical anthropology) the traffic in women, or – returning to the sombre figure of Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge from whom he took his original cue – as a fit of blind and drunken stupor.’

Two issues later the journal published a letter from Thompson objecting strongly to this criticism, saying that all the evidence supported his interpretation of wife sales. In his reply, Samuel stoked the fires further by suggesting that Thompson’s viewpoint reflected the sexual libertarianism of the time when it was written: ‘the article belongs surely that liberal hour of the 1960s when multiple or plural relationships were being widely canvassed as a release from the coils of matrimony’. ‘Had Thompson’s interest been in the subjection of women’, Samuel went on, ‘he might have chosen to put a less favourable glow on the proceedings’. Why, Samuel asked, ‘if marital breakdown was the point of interest’, did Thompson not look at cases of wife-beating, or rape, or ‘the records of the overseers of the poor…with their often poignant documentation of the plight of the abandoned and the deserted?’ Thompson did not respond to this.

There is an interesting later intervention from a woman whose g-g-grandfather, according to family tradition, had sold his wife.

But I would have thought that some slight acquaintance with the operation of the divorce laws might have suggested All More Complicated scenarios: while up until 1970 in England and Wales divorce was constructed as an adversarial guilty vs innocent party action, and indeed it could be adversarial and hostile (I invoke the saga of Russell v Russell in the 1890s) there was also the convention of the put-up job of fake adultery for the purposes of dissolving the marriage neither party wanted any longer.

Well, the gasman came, rather over the allotted time slot, but at least he turned up, unlike the memorable time when we had an engineer scheduled who was just approaching - just approaching - according to the website, well on into the late evening, and just disappeared; and then was supposed to be turning up the following morning; and then we got a text that no, not until next week -

So really, an hour or so later than anticipated, and fixed the heating and hot water, we count that a win, no?

Even if there were mutterings about the age and fragility of the system and the fact that They Do Not Make The Parts any more.

So, probably a new boiler in our future, but think we will leave it until the warmer weather comes.

***

Have a few things of interest:

I lately discovered that for a period in the twentieth century bestiality was grounds for divorce (well, it had been one of the contributory grounds under the 1857 Act, but apparently certain Serious Sexual Crimes were kept in, rather quietly, in 1923, as grounds on their own).

I liked this story about a woman's important conchological collection being saved (even if it was by a series of fortunate events), but do we not see that same old story of women's actually serious scientific endeavours being dismissed as Ye Feminine Trivialities? (come on down, Mary Delany! - who also, as I recall, took an interest in shells).

This is rather charming: A Folklorist Looks at Ice Cream Vans (passing mention of the dodgy reputation of ice-cream parlours, which a mate of mine wrote on in interwar Scottish context).

The troubling spike in syphilis cases in USA in pregnant women (though Sid & I are beswozzled that a disease that was epidemic throughout C19th until Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, 1909, is said to be 'Mostly associated with 15th century sailors'. It really is down to public health issues.

Victoria Park, East London: ‘the People’s Park’: yes, okay, the chartered streets, but also green spaces.

This is possibly a rather jaundiced view of current US polyamory: Once the province of utopian free-love communities, consensual non-monogamy is now the stuff of Park Slope marriages and prestige television.

However, this picture of privileged frolicing in the hay resonated somewhat with this: A new generation of sexually adventurous middle-aged women are exploring kink and fantasies without shame, according to the founder of one of the UK’s largest sex-positive communities.

Admittedly these occasions sound not unlike the parties described to me by 70s Swinger:

Women are consciously in the driving seat at Killing Kittens events – men, known as Toms, are not allowed to attend without a woman, and when the fun gets started, only women can make the first approach.

except that according to him (and indeed a lot of the literature about 'swinging' from that period) there was a lot of lady-on-lady action happening. And honestly I am wondering about the (implict) heteronormativy of this enterprise and do they really find a sufficient quotient 'free from toxic masculinity'.

It also makes me think back to some of the 'free-love' types in the 1920s, who seemed to me to be coming possibly less from a utopian sex-reform tradition than trying to democratise a kind of Edwardian (and longer) house-party trad of partner-swapping.

Whereas at another level entirely, unfortunate couples find themselves stuck together because they cannot afford to divorce: Financial pressures have led to postponement of 19% of divorces, involving 270,000 couples, Legal & General claims.

As is oft my wont, I thought further about my post about success vs victory -

And what I thought was, thinking about the areas in which I have been interested as a historian, how very often the victories/successes after a great deal of turmoil and struggle were still only partial and still needed further fighting for - hardly the time to sit down and celebrate.

E.g. I will cite the very limited grant of female suffrage in the UK in 1918, requiring a further 10 years of campaigning to get it on equal terms in 1928 - described in demeaning language as 'the flapper vote', i.e. women aged 21-30 and those above who had not been previously eligible were being dissed as irresponsible light-minded Bright Young Things.

And even those very limited and partial gains have people wailing Deth Of Civ, as I'm sure they did when in 1923 the terms for divorce were finally equalised and women did not have to prove that their husbands were fiends in human form but only adulterous. (Unfortunately they could not divorce them if they were fiends in human form who had not, however, been unfaithful to their marriage vows.)

And as for Abortion Law Reform (I have lately written on this), scarcely was the ink dry on the 1967 Act that there were attempts to roll it back, limit it at least, hedge it about, and the next decades had activists forced to fight to keep the Act where it was, rather than being able to amend it in more liberal directions.

Progress is slow and sometimes retrograde.

The other day I virtually attended this presentation: 'Homosexuality, Bureaucracy and the Admiralty: The Suppression of so-called ‘Unnatural Vice’ in Churchill's Navy, 1911-15' (as one would).

And pretty much in passing, the speaker mentioned an instance involving an officer (most were the lower ranks), during WW1, who resigned his commission rather than being court-martialled for an 'unnatural offence', and later on his wife asked the Admiralty for the information as she was divorcing him, and they refused. But apparently she got the divorce anyway on adultery.

Speaker assumed this meant he was bisexual, but me, being nerdy about the English divorce laws and its intricacies, went:

If this is before 1923, even if he was adulterous, she still needed an additional matrimonial offence to get quit of him: one of those in the relevant Act was 'sodomy'. Post 1923 there is a fair amount of evidence of the 'fake adultery in hotel rooms with hired co-respondent' and one dares say that may have happened (alongside the other necessary matrimonial offences, 1857-1923).

I have nobly refrained from communicating this to someone whose area is actually the history of the Navy.

But I will, I think, inform the author of biography ms I am reading, as to the probable reason why an 'arrangement' which had been ticking over apparently placidly, or at least being accepted by the relevant persons, for a couple of decades, suddenly had a divorce occuring in 1972.

The Divorce Reform Act 1969. One member of this menage was relatively well-known and very likely did not want the publicity and possible career repercussions that would presumably have accrued from a divorce case under the previous dispensation. Whereas - and given that after this Act there was a torrent of divorces (plus remarriages of a lot of people who had been living with partners they could not legally marry) - it went largely uncommented upon.

I think it is worth mentioning that, it makes the divorce a whole lot less 'out of the blue' than it looks like.

Um, exactly who is the snoflaek here? (The second husband - who I think we might consider a 'nepo kid', hmmm? - in question is notorious anti-woke woezerer about cancel culture): Before the interview I’m told that, for legal reasons, she can’t discuss [2nd husband], whom she divorced in 2016 and who is the father of her two sons... their relationship seems fraught, to say the least.

We feel that he should take the Wellington line and say 'Publish and be damned' at least, rather than go the writ-waving route, no?

***

World’s oldest recorded tortoise [and LGBTQ+ icon] prepares for 190th birthday party.

***

I'm trying to remember that thing that was going around, oh, maybe in the 90s/early 00s about hormones in sweat and their influence on persons of opposite gender - was it on men of women in different stages of menstrual cycle - on women of men when they were at different stages of cycle - know I heard a very I thought dodgy paper at some conference which was leaning on this, and on how hormonal contraception suppressed these Natural Urges - anyway, this was what made me think of this, which seems to have died away? (all the refs I could find were of older date) - Is birth control turning women bi? (author there is sceptical, go them) - in fact article they refer to is by an ev-psych type person, which I think might have been in the mix with what I remembered.

***

Sort of by a process of association: “A Toste wett in Muskadine”: Preventing Miscarriage in Early Modern English Recipe Books c.1600–1780:

[I]nduced abortion and family limitation practices have received much attention in the historiography, which consequently marginalises the experiences of women who desired children and took active steps to improve their fertility and retain pregnancies until birth.

Fair. McLaren in A History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day pointed out that there were times and situations when promoting conception was just as much if not more a concern, but I don't think (without going and digging up my copy) there's much on preventing miscarriage.

***

A Victorian woman of middling status who managed to obtain a divorce (post 1857, true, and her husband was obliging enough to commit bigamy, which I suspect was the deciding factor): Hannah Brutton and the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. On account of bigamy was an actual crime, whereas courts could be very iffy as to whether what husbands had done was really cruelty sufficient to count.

So I decided to go to the Lesbian Motherhood seminar, since it turned out the one about women seeking Parliamentary Divorces in early C19th was discussion of a precirculated paper, and I was okay with just reading that (informative!). And the Lesbian Motherhood seminar was being recorded, so if that interests you, just putting it out there.

***

Otherwise the nigglesomeness of life is still rather present - there was the instance of Saturday evening's meal turning out to have yeast extract in it, which the list of ingredients on the website did not state, and although I took the risk did have incipient signs of migraine, though had medication on hand.

BUT I sent them a complaint and they were very apologetic and sending a complimentary voucher, and maybe this might even feed back into the system?

Also in Dept Nigglesome was trying to look up my sales on Google Play, which have beeen slightly less minimal than usual lately, and found that I was being required to submit Tax Info, and after flailing around the website which did NOT do the things it was supposed to do (like have the menus I was supposed to access), discovered I was sent a nudging email about this some while ago and was able to deal with it all via link therein.

This is particularly irksome given that, even were I not exempt US tax under treaty, I cannot imagine I have made enough to pay tax on.

***

In Dept, People Really Don't Know What Archivists Do, there was a doozy yesterday in Ask A Manager (second down):

I work as an archivist and records manager. I’m the only one in this role. I enjoy the variety; I might be doing a variety of desk-based information management, research tasks, or I might be moving boxes of papers around. All of these tasks are a very normal part of an archivist’s job. Recently a senior colleague, Jennifer, is concerned every time she sees me moving boxes, and insists she will help or gets other members of staff to help. She’s also said repeatedly that I “shouldn’t have to do this” or even “shouldn’t be doing this.”

Ugh ugh ugh. It's not just the whole 'I've been trained to lift/handle things' aspect: when I was moving boxes I had a process all worked out in my mind and the last thing I wanted was eager beavers trying to 'help' me.

Okay, feeling the strain after a day of boxing and heaving under less than optimum conditions (actually this was in the context of transferring a collection which involved several such days) was not immaterial in my decision to retire when I did.

Or, 3, count 'em, 3 seminars I would really not at all mind virtually attending tomorrow afternoon, all pretty much at the same time.

Ayahs and Amahs: A free, online talk, on the lives of Asian nannies employed by European families during the 1800s and 1900s at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich.

(Also relating to this topic: Ayahs' Home: Remembering the forgotten Indian nannies of London)

Lesbian Motherhood Then and Now (Institute of Historical Research History of Sexuality seminar). Though the 'then' relative to 'now' covers a relatively (i.e. living memory) time-span. Nonetheless, a period of major changes.

(And on this topic and relating to social changes, the Gateways is having another moment: Life inside the wild London club where lesbians were free to be themselves; and a TV documentary.)

Also at the IHR in a different seminar series: ‘Too many restrictions could not be thrown in the way of divorce’: Attitudes to Women’s Petitions for Divorce by Act of Parliament 1801-1831, which for a history of matrimonial legislation nerd such as myself is actually rather tempting. (I did not know that as many as 4 women actually managed to obtain Parliamentary divorces, pre 1857.)

***

And in the generally related area of recuperating forgotten/neglected/condescended to parts of women's history, I suppose it's a good thing that somebody is (sort of) taking 'fangirls' seriously but still not quite (it seems to me?). The truth about screaming fangirls. Teenage pop fans have long been derided as vacuous victims of marketing. But there is so much more to it than that.

I wonder how many cultural phenomena were dissed on as being the province of silly young girls before they eventually became worthy of serious attention? - e.g. girls were screaming at the Beatles before they became deemed COOL, no? Also I wonder about people doing fan studies who can say this:

“Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of colour, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control,” Allison McCracken, an associate professor and director of the American-studies programme at DePaul University, told me. “Everything is set up against this idea of white straight masculinity, where the emotions are in control and the body is in control.”

Well, maybe the class thing, but sports fans? Maybe it's the things the emotions are about, as well...

Book I am reading for review (which is v good, just saying, this is a relatively minor quibble due to angle it is taking on the events in question) is clearly finding it hard to get its head around the fact that a lawyer who was clearly and actively on the side of reforming the Sodomy Laws in the early C19th -

- nonetheless has been very strongly suspected of deploying the threat of disclosing allegations that Lord Byron inflicted sodomitical practices on his wife (this being just as capitally illegal at the time as male-male offences) in order to obtain, not just Lady Byron's legal separation from Lord B, but that custody of Ada was awarded to her (custody of children normally went to fathers, patriarchy ROOOLED).

He is known to have been Very Sympathetic to women in the matrimonial courts (such as they were) in the pre-1857 dispensation.

And okay, along with the 'men should not be punished for their innate dispositions', there was also a discourse of 'there is nothing wrong with loving married couples consensually exploring pleasures beyond the missionary position' among people interested in reforming the law (who were, true, a minority).

But I was sitting there going - 'Lord Byron - relationship to consent, just a leeetle problematic, huh, especially given contemporary attitudes to husband's rights over wife's body', even if there is still a school of thought that is, 'bet Annabella enjoyed it at the time'.

Yeah, while being obliged to live on civil terms not just with her husband and his frightening dark moods but with his partner in adulterous incest, I'm sure she was really up for exploring the wilder frontiers of erotic experience....

Women could not obtain divorces at the time (one did, pre 1857 but the circumstances were so unusual it was basically Albie the Yorkshire-dwelling albatross).

The laws were heavily weighted against women. One cannot really blame Annabella for not wanting to cede an infant daughter to Byron.

But none of the other grounds that I think we would now consider justification for dissolving a marriage - adultery, cruelty, and (at least suspicions of) insanity could be invoked. The best she could hope for was a legal separation, and custody.

Time, one thinks, to bring up the nuclear option, because nothing else was likely to get Byron to concede.

I think approaching the question from the 'awful choices women had under matrimonial law' angle puts a very different complexion on the choices made.

(The inequities of divorce law did not go away: I have the strongest suspicion that Marie Stopes lied like a rug to get her first marriage annulled in 1916, but her first husband was such a monster that I am still pretty much 'you go girl' at that high-risk strategy.)

Was lately given to think about my darling Dame Rebecca's apercu, way back in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, on the situation she observes post-emancipation, where the young man and woman set out together and:

[P]resently the woman looks around and sees that the man is not with her. He is some considerable distance behind her, not feeling very well. There has been drained from him the strength which his forefathers derived from the subjection of women[.]

Because I came across this, which I presume is fairly demographically niche: More and More Women Are Paying Alimony to Failure-to-Launch Ex-Husbands.

But nonethless had a certain resonance with stuff one is coming across in AITA and online advice columns where the woman is doing not merely the trad wymmynz work but also bringing home the bacon and managing the family budget and bloke is either doing something more low-powered or 'pursuing his dream' (hollo larfter) or nothing much at all, including not stepping up to do his share of the domestics and parentage stuff -

Pretty much like what one reads about the lionesses going out and doing the hunting for the pride while the lions sit around preening their manes...

And, okay, this is not necessarily anything like a statistically representative sample and may even be the reverse, given the number of people who vociferate in comments that that is not the way things are supposed to be, though again, that may be as much an ideal as e.g. Victorian notions of what Wholly Matrimony should look like.

While the 1950s retreat into domesticity was largely driven by women being pushed out of the workforce etc, there was also (maybe) a certain pull factor among women who had had to step up during the Depression and the war years? - though they then found (paging e.g. Betty Friedan) that Ye Olde Feminine Mystique was not all it was cracked up to be. I.e. that didn't actually work.

I was so cheering for what Polly Toynbee was saying about the 70s: Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …:

Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. It’s an image that obscures the radical social changes and great progressive leaps forward that took place then....So why does history record the 70s as nothing but a time of strife, shortages, hyper-inflation and decline? Well, it’s because history is written by the victor. And that victor was Margaret Thatcher, whose 1979 election conquest sought to uproot, marketise and diminish the role of the postwar state. Her political tribe used all their media power to expunge inconvenient 70s memories that didn’t fit her narrative, as surely as Stalin purged Trotsky from the photographic record. It was a goodbye to John Maynard Keynes’s generous social democratic state[.]

She doesn't glamourise the decade - the racism the sexism, etc. (And what tripled divorce rates - and women's freedom - in the 70s, was actually the 1969 Divorce Act, finally implementing recommendations that had first been made before the Great War. [Will concede that I am nerd about lawz of mattermoney...])

For me, personally, it was the best of times it was the worst of times, in that I was in a dreadful relationship but I was on (after an initial wrong direction) The Right Career Path.

On, at any given time a lot of things are happening, and not all of them are the things we remember, or rather, some people will remember some things and others will remember others and not always will the twain coincide: 1922: Scenes from a Turbulent Year by Nick Rennison review:

In this enjoyable slice of popular history, he assembles a month-by-month almanac, including all the most notable moments from science, politics, art and culture. It makes for some unlikely associations. So, for example, January 1922 saw the second trial of Hollywood comedy actor Fatty Arbuckle for rape and manslaughter, the first successful treatment of diabetics with insulin, the death of Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica and Edith Sitwell’s debut performance of Façade to William Walton’s score.

And what seemed important then does not necessarily seem important now...

I happened to have a Zoom meeting yesterday of one of the bodies I have got involved with because of being involved with its archives over an extended period. During the course of which I happened to deliver myself of an apercu of mine that just because something does not look like an astounding success (an institution that did not last, a small and insignificant society, a legal case that was not won) it may in fact have had long term effects.

There is an understandable, if problematic, use of the term 'divorce' when people write about matrimonial difficulties pre the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act. It's not entirely anachronistic: however, it is misleading.

There was an action in the Ecclesiastical Courts called 'divorce a mensa et thoro' which permitted the spouses to live apart, i.e. the equivalent of a judicial separation, and it could be sought by either partner, though wives tended to have to prove quite extraordinary levels of husbandly misconduct.

(There was also the possibility of couples who just could not bear living together entering into a private deed of separation.)

(In both cases, the amount of pressure that could be brought to bear by the wife's relatives or interested friends was probably a significant factor.)

Men, if they really really really wanted to remarry, and had lots and lots of money, could then, supposing their wife had been adulterous, sue her lover for damages in a suit for criminal conversation 'crim.con.', the staple of the Georgian equivalent of tabloid journalists.

If they brought that off, they could then seek a private Act of Parliament to procure a divorce which would enable them to remarry and beget legitimate offspring.

This was not a recourse for women - as I recall there was one case of a woman obtaining a Parliamentary Act of Divorcement and that involved really unusual and extraordinary circumstances.

So I am just a little irked if people writing about a period pre 1857 use the term 'divorce' when they're actually meaning the ecclesiastical separation.

I will give a slight pass to writers of romantic fiction, but if you are writing a biography in which the intricacies of matrimonial law are central to the persons involved, I would like you to be a bit more up front about what this actually meant.

I am also not entirely sure that your late Georgian upper-class husband had any major qualms about the reflection on his masculinity involved in living on his wife's earnings as a writer, given that hanging out for heiresses and marrying for money was a major occupation of men of his class. I can see that maybe he needed to have some occupation suited to his rank but as ALL HER MONEY BELONGED TO HIM anyway I'm not sure the fact that she was the one earning it was really afflicting his manhood. (As opposed to other issues in the marriage.)

Okay, this is not a World-Shattering Historical Discovery, but nonetheless it gratified me.

I am currently looking into a mid-Victorian case of medical awfulness which is now well-known and positively iconic about Dreadful Victorian Docs, but at the time it was all pretty hushed, outside the fierce hoohah that went on inside medical societies and medical journals, because professional omerta.

(There is, my dearios, a wider argument weaving through the longer paper about the medprof doing that, and striking off the Register anyone who dared to communicate e.g. matters concerning contraception to The Multitude for 6d a go, instead of pontificating at medical conferences and eventually publishing a tastefully bound volume at a guinea or so, for Ye Profession Onlye.)

Part of the hoohah was because the central figure had, perhaps, been a little over the line in self-promotion, as well as getting himself in dutch with the Commissioners in Lunacy.

But I discovered, quite by chance, while looking through that somewhat passe work, Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud (1969), one of the early works on the seething morasses of Victsex, that he mentions a certain bizarre divorce case, in the course of which the wife (whose sanity was in question, as to whether she could actually have consented to the match) had 'a mysterious operation' performed on her, unknown to the husband, by Doc Now Famed As Avatar of Victorian Medical Monstrosity. Except that Pearsall did not seem to have sussed this.

So I went and looked the divorce case up in the British Newspaper Archive and it was the sensation of early 1867, being reported the length and breadth of the realm - mostly in terms repeated from one journal to another. And while the operation may have been mysterious to Pearsall, the husband referred to it as 'a most cruel, he might say barbarous operation'.

Having stroppy correspondence with the Commissioners in Lunacy appearing in The Times was one thing: I think having his name mentioned in a high-profile divorce case doing the ethically dodgy thing of operating on a wife without telling her husband (there were relatives in the picture, the whole thing was ripe for Victorian AITA) in a cruel and barbarous manner might have been felt to be bringing The Profession Into Disrepute, Something Must Be Done.

I.e. beyond argifying about his practices and ethical standards. Massive meeting of a medical society specifically to expel him. But this contextual detail has, as far as I know, not previously been mentioned in the historiography of the case.

Profile

oursin

My Website

October 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Active Entries

Style Credit

Style: Green for Basic Boxes by branchandroot

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Oct. 25th, 2026 08:35 am

It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with divorce

Dept of, disentangling attractive and persistent MYFFS

This is really, really niche

Not the mute children of the soil....

Miscellany

Closing more tabs

Wednesday has accomplished a little light life admin

Actually feeling a bit weepy, in a good way, over this

Clio has noted a thing or two in passing

Gasman cameth

Too good for The Poorz?

Thinking further about this, and partial successes

I did, in fact, resist the urge to elaborate upon the situation

Bits and pieces

Life is going on, sorta

The 73 bus phenomenon

Conflicting priorities, surely?

Maybe just a flurry of black swans - maybe?

What might have been and what has been

I am a nerd about English matrimonial law

What I do is me/for this I came