What’s yours is mine

Posted by Barbara on August 17, 2015 in Blog, Living today, News | 1 comment

property market/Alan Cleaver/flickr

August 18, 1882. The Married Women’s Property Act receives Royal Assent and married women are at last in control of their assets and financial destinies.

One early beneficiary of the new law was the author Florence Marryat, who achieved a separation from her violent husband, Thomas Ross Church, after an earlier version of the Act was passed in 1870. Church was an officer in the British army in India, and Marryat spent most of her married life in England with him visiting occasionally. She wove themes of marital cruelty, alcoholism and adultery into her writing, stating she wrote from personal experience. On separation, she had to demonstrate that it was primarily her earnings which had been supporting their eight children, and the courts refused her husband’s claim on her assets. When the couple finally divorced in 1878 Church again sued in the courts on the grounds of impoverishment, only to have his claim refused by a judge for the second time. It should be noted that Church died a rich man in his own right – a liar as well as a bully.

Prior to the Act, a woman who married in effect lost her identity, status and individuality; she became indivisible from her husband unless widowhood resolved the matter. The law stated that on marriage a woman was ‘under the protection of her husband, her baron or lord.’ Control of her personal property passed to her husband, and she could not draft a will or dispose of any possessions without his agreement. This state of affairs continued when a man acquired a mistress and even if he chose to co-habit with her. He was at complete liberty to use the income from his wife’s assets to support the additional expenses caused by his new personal arrangements, an arrangement approved by the courts.

Ironically, single women retained their property rights, so the higher status conferred by marriage would need to be set against the independence afforded by spinsterhood. If we take Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and other novels of that era as a yardstick, it would seem that there was no real contest. For the likes of Mrs Bennett it was marriage or bust for her daughters, as they had no independent means.

In the rare cases of divorce, the female party was invariably left impoverished as there was no guarantee that the woman’s property would be restored to her, and male judges nearly always ruled in favour of the husband. As the feminist movement grew, the intensive lobbying from high profile women resulted in the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, arguably the most important piece of legislation for women’ s rights that century. Married women were at last treated as a separate legal entity, and this development gave a strong impetus to the campaign for women’s suffrage, the argument being that now they were in charge of their own assets it no longer made sense for them to be denied the vote.

Marryat wrote prolifically and achieved financial independence despite the prevailing climate of opinion. Let’s spare a thought for all those women trapped today in relationships with violent husbands and no financial resources; they still can’t leave their marriage and take control – whatever the law in theory allows them.