Affiliation:
1. History Department, St. Mary's College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, MD, USA,
Abstract
A systematic sample of the petitions presented to the English Divorce Court from 1858 through 1908 makes it possible to assess the differential contribution of discrete social and economic subgroups to the litigation the Court oversaw. An examination of four of these—the titled aristocracy, those employed in the theater, those in receipt of financial aid, and laborers—shows that English divorce litigants exhibited a broader social profile than commonly attributed to it by the newspaper coverage of divorce litigation, which gave a skewed impression of its social profile. Analysis of these cases underscores the gendered, class, and geographically inflected demand for divorce in a judicial setting that imposed severe restrictions on access to divorce as a remedy for marital breakdown.
Subject
Social Sciences (miscellaneous),Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Anthropology
Reference20 articles.
1. DIVORCE IN ENGLAND 1700–1857
2. On restitution of conjugal rights and its significance see: Stephen Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century: A History (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2003), 143-51; Maeve Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992).
3. The Divorce Court and the Queen’s/King’s Proctor: Legal Patriarchy and the Sanctity of Marriage in England, 1861‑1937
4. Guy Routh, Occupation and Pay in Great Britain 1906-60 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1965 ), 97.
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