A History of the Wife (29 page)

The man Brontë eventually did marry at thirty-nine was surely not someone who corresponded to her earlier aspirations. Arthur Bell Nicholls, a clergyman, seems to have been a rather ordinary person, by no means the intellectual equal of the by-then famous author, and hardly a type “to die for.” But at thirty-nine Brontë probably felt she could wait no longer. She spent an apparently happy honeymoon in Ireland with Nicholls’s family, and may even have come to love him, before she died nine months later from pregnancy-related sickness.

Brontë’s literary heroines fared better. Jane Eyre, at the end of her tumultuous story, was able to say:

I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest— blest beyond what language can express: because I am my husband’s life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

Like Anne Bradstreet two hundred years earlier, Brontë’s fictive hero- ine looked to the language of the Bible to express the ideal of love, equality, and oneness in marriage that many women yearned for.

The typical English novel of this period ended in marriage, as if acquiring a spouse would resolve all of life’s problems. In one of Frances Trollope’s novels,
The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman
(1864), the thirty-year-old heroine Charlotte Morris writes in her diary on the eve of her marriage: “unless my life be prematurely cut short, my history does not end here, although the event which usually concludes the history of a woman may be said to be reached.”
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Trollope, who by

that time was well into her own history as a wife, mother of six chil- dren, and author out of economic necessity, had learned the hard way that marriage is rarely the wedded bliss pictured in poetry and fiction.

MARITAL LAWS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

To begin with, the law did not see married women as the equals of their husbands. In fact, wives had absolutely no legal existence, in the words of Sir William Blackstone’s 1753
Commentaries on the Laws of En- gland,
which continued to provide the basis for common law in nine- teenth-century England and America. “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being, or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.” Or, as the popular saying went, “husband and wife are one person, and that person is the husband.”

The Law still allowed a husband to give his wife “moderate correc- tion” and to beat her with a stick, provided that it be no larger than a finger and not as large as a man’s thumb. Although people of the upper classes claimed that corporal punishment was exercised primarily by people of the lower ranks, today’s data on wife beating indicate that it exists at all levels of society, which leads us to assume that it was not, in the past, confined to the great unwashed.

Concerning material possessions, the law left no doubt as to owner- ship: “A woman’s personal property, by marriage, becomes absolutely her husband’s.” This included whatever property his wife owned before her marriage and her earnings as a married woman. The husband had the right to leave this property at the time of his death to whomever he wished, reserving only a third of it for his widow.

Worse yet for an unhappily married woman, she was not allowed to live separately from her husband, if he insisted upon cohabitation. The 1840 English case of Cecilia Maria Cochrane, who had run away from her husband four years earlier to live with her mother in Paris, is illus- trative. When the husband got her back by stratagem and locked her up, she managed to obtain a writ of habeas corpus and brought suit against him. The judge decreed, in accordance with the “general dominion which the law of England attributes to the husband over the wife,” that Mr. Cochrane was entitled to prevent his wife “from the dan-

ger of unrestrained intercourse with the world, by enforcing cohabita- tion and a common residence.” Cecilia Cochrane was sentenced to “perpetual imprisonment.”
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Insofar as children were concerned, their legal custody belonged to the father. In the case of divorce, even one caused by an abusive or adulterous husband, the divorced wife could be prevented from seeing her own children. During the first half of the nineteenth century, divorce was exceedingly rare in England, since it could be obtained only by an act of Parliament at the exhorbitant price of 800 to 900 pounds—that is, three times what a comfortable middle-class couple needed to live on in a year! Under those conditions, it is not surprising that only 3 percent of divorces were initiated by wives.
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How even that small percent of women paid such astronomical fees begs the question of where a wife could acquire the means. Perhaps family or wealthy friends came forth in some cases, or some wives may have “stolen” it from family assets.

The widely publicized case of Caroline Sheridan Norton, separated from her husband, the Hon. George Norton, and denied access to their three children, played a major role in helping to change British divorce and child custody laws. When Mrs. Norton and her husband separated in 1836, he refused to pay her an adequate allowance, although much of the property that had come to her from her parents was now in his possession. Thrown on her own resources, Caroline Norton tried her hand at writing and managed to support herself on her earnings, which, by law, belonged to her husband and which he, from time to time, tried to get hold of. Mrs. Norton wrote a polemical pamphlet out- lining her grievances and those of other women in her situation, which helped to win passage of the 1839 Act that allowed mothers limited access to their children. When Parliament finally took up the question of divorce reform, Mrs. Norton’s
Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill
(1855) contained her personal story and the following eye-opening information:

An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of “conjugal rights,” but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge . . . and carry her away by force . . .

If the wife sue for separation for cruelty, it must be “cruelty that

endangers life or limb” . . .

If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself. . . . She is not represented by attor- ney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for “damages.”

If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce
her
so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband,
a vinculo,
however profligate he may be. No law court can divorce in England. A special Act of Parliament annulling the marriage is passed for each case.
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Another woman who contributed significantly to the marital reform movement was Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the daughter of a wealthy and influential radical member of Parliament. Her 1854 pam- phlet,
A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concerning Women,
became a key document in the midcentury parlia- mentary debate. It attracted the attention not only of lawmakers, but also of reform-minded women, who organized a committee to gather proof of the hardships wives endured under the existing laws. A peti- tion with 26,000 signatures, including those of such literary luminaries as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell, was presented to Parliament in March 1856. The petition made the point that “modern civilisation, in indefinitely extending the sphere of occupation for women, has in some measure broken down their pecuniary dependence upon men,” and that it was time for “legal protection [to] be thrown over the produce of their labour.” Married women of the middle and upper classes were entering “the fields of lit- erature and art, in order to increase the family income,” while women of the lower ranks were able to find employment in factory work and “other multifarious occupations.” The poor woman, in particular, needed legal protection because she “may work from morning till night to see the produce of her labour wrested from her [by her husband], and wasted in a gin-palace.”
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At this time, according to the census of 1861, one-third of the labor force were women, and of these, nearly one-fourth were married.

The Divorce Act or Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 transferred jurisdiction of matters relating to separation and divorce from ecclesias- tical courts to newly established secular courts. The grounds for

divorce remained cruelty and adultery, but a wife had to prove adultery aggravated by desertion, cruelty, rape, “buggery,” or bestiality. A man could ask for divorce simply on the grounds of adultery. This double standard, based on the popular view that adultery was more reprehen- sible on the part of a wife than on the part of a husband, remained in British law until 1929, when the grounds for divorce finally became the same for both parties. The most significant change of the 1857 Act was that a woman who succeeded in obtaining either a separation or a divorce was henceforth entitled to all the property rights of an unmar- ried person. This was decidedly a step in the right direction, though it changed nothing for the married woman, whose husband continued to have full possession of the family property and his wife’s income.

While divorce still remained rare and costly, it was initiated some- what more frequently by women, as in the 1869 case of Mrs. Frances Kelly, who was granted a judicial separation from her husband, the Rev- erend James Kelly, on the grounds of “Cruelty” and “Undue Exercise of Marital Authority.” The judgment in her favor argued that the husband had purposely attempted to make his wife unhappy so as to bend her to his will. While it upheld the principle of the husband’s dominant rights, it also set limits to his behavior: “Without disparaging the just and paramount authority of a husband, it may be safely asserted that a wife is not a domestic slave, to be driven at all cost... into compliance with her husband’s demands.”
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Increasingly, in the years to come, divorce would become an issue of paramount importance for wives from every segment of Western society, but in nineteenth-century England, it remained largely a privilege of the upper classes, and one that left a greater taint on the divorcée than on her ex-husband.

Finally, in 1870, Parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed wives to gain control of their personal property and income. Much of the credit for this legislation belonged to the eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill, elected to Parliament in 1865, and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. During the heated parliamentary debate that lasted from 1868 to 1870, Mill published his treatise
The Subjection of Women
(1869), which became an overnight classic for proponents of women’s rights. Other distinguished men and women, including Mrs. Bodichon, contributed to the defeat of the conservative faction, many of whom expressed the fear that granting married women property rights would lead to female independence and immorality. As parlia-

mentarian Henry Raikes put it, in a conjugal quarrel, the wife could say: “I have my own property, and if you don’t like me, I can go and live with somebody who does.” The idea of equal property would, in his opinion, “create a factitious, an artificial, and an unnatural equality between man and woman.”
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Equality between the sexes was still seen by the likes of Raikes as “unnatural.”

Among the many arguments in favor of reform were the examples drawn from those American states that had amended the common law so as to allow married women control over their property. While Raikes and other conservatives denounced such “Americanization” of English institutions, reform was the order of the day in 1870 and again, in 1882, when the married Women’s Property Bill added stronger meas- ures to the earlier law. From that point on, an Englishwoman could not only hold on to whatever she owned at the time of marriage or acquired after marriage, but she could also enter into contracts and sue and be sued, and dispose of her property by sale, gift, or will.

Special provisions had been added for the wife whose husband had been convicted of domestic violence. The wife of such a man could apply for “an order protecting her earnings and property.” The husband could be restrained from “going to or visiting the wife without her con- sent.” The wife could be given legal custody of the children up to the age of ten, with the husband mandated to pay the wife “a weekly sum for the maintenance of herself and such children.” Although these pro- visions did not put an end to wife beating and other forms of abuse, the law had at least established procedures for dealing with a violent husband.

On the whole, American marital laws were similar to British laws for the first half of the century, but individual states wrote their own ver- sions, and some were distinctly more favorable to women. In 1848, when feminist reformers under the leadership of Elizabeth Cady Stan- ton and Lucretia Mott met in Seneca Falls, they drew up a woman’s bill of rights that demanded redress for many inequities in the legal code. Their resolutions, known as the “Declaration of Sentiments,” included the following diatribe against the all-powerful husband:

He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she

earns. . . .

He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the chil- dren shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
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Eliabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, leaders of the feminist movement for the rest of the century, agreed that the question of mar- riage was “the foundation of all reforms” for women. As Stanton (who was married) wrote in a 1853 letter to Anthony (who was not): “It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman, so long as she is degraded in marriage.... I feel that this whole question of woman’s rights turns on the point of the marriage relation.”
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And for Stanton, the only accept- able marriage was based on love, sympathy, and equality between the sexes.