Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95

Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350189072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
“Important both for political theorists and for women's studies. She explores with great care and thoroughness the connections between nineteenth century feminist argument and activism on the one hand, and familiar liberal principles of justice and equality on the other” - Nannerl 0. Keohane, Wellesley College Traditional studies of the women's movement in Victorian England focused on the battle for suffrage and other public rights. In this new study, however, Mary Lyndon Shanlev explores how Victorian women campaigned to reform the laws which related to marriage and the married state. Arguing that without a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship there would be no justice for women, they fought a series of campaigns to change laws governing divorce, married women's property, infanticide, protective labour legislation, child custody, wife abuse, marital rape and the “restitution of conjugal rights”. Women involved in these campaigns exposed the connection between the privileged position of men in both public and private life and the reluctance of Parliament to enact the reforms women sought. In a series of case studies Shanley explores the demands of the reformers, and the response of Parliament. In an Epilogue, Shanley warns of the dangers to liberal feminism in relying exclusively on equal rights in the law as a formula for change.

Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95

Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9781350189072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Important both for political theorists and for women's studies. She explores with great care and thoroughness the connections between nineteenth century feminist argument and activism on the one hand, and familiar liberal principles of justice and equality on the other” - Nannerl 0. Keohane, Wellesley College Traditional studies of the women's movement in Victorian England focused on the battle for suffrage and other public rights. In this new study, however, Mary Lyndon Shanlev explores how Victorian women campaigned to reform the laws which related to marriage and the married state. Arguing that without a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship there would be no justice for women, they fought a series of campaigns to change laws governing divorce, married women's property, infanticide, protective labour legislation, child custody, wife abuse, marital rape and the “restitution of conjugal rights”. Women involved in these campaigns exposed the connection between the privileged position of men in both public and private life and the reluctance of Parliament to enact the reforms women sought. In a series of case studies Shanley explores the demands of the reformers, and the response of Parliament. In an Epilogue, Shanley warns of the dangers to liberal feminism in relying exclusively on equal rights in the law as a formula for change.

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691215987
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Bridging the fields of political theory and history, this comprehensive study of Victorian reforms in marriage law reshapes our understanding of the feminist movement of that period. As Mary Shanley shows, Victorian feminists argued that justice for women would not follow from public rights alone, but required a fundamental transformation of the marriage relationship.

Feminism, Mariage & the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95

Feminism, Mariage & the Law in Victorian England, 1850-95 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description


Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1851895

Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1851895 PDF Author: Mary Lyndon Shanley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781850431534
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Women, Marriage and the Law in Victorian Society

Women, Marriage and the Law in Victorian Society PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Feminism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
When Victoria came to the throne in 1837, two main factors shaped the lives of her female subjects: on the one hand, the rhetorical claim that marriage and family life were the necessary and sufficient conditions of a woman's fulfilment; on the other, the reality that under the common law principles of coverture a married woman's property, children, and body belonged to her husband, and her legal existence was wholly subsumed in his. The task facing Victorian feminists was to challenge the laws governing property rights, the custody of infants, divorce, prostitution, and the power of the courts to enforce a woman to live with her husband against her will (the doctrine of 'conjugal rights'). In varying degrees they were able to amend each of these laws, but not to achieve their core aims: to abolish the fiction of spousal unity, and to establish co-equal legal and political rights for men and women. That task remained for a later generation of feminists.

Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England

Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England PDF Author: Joseph Ambrose Banks
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Having demonstrated that their economic aspirations and circumstances were a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the onset of family limitation by the English upper and middle classes, another suggested explanation, the emancipation of women, is examined in this study. This shows how the feminists were little involved in the family limitation campaigns, and concludes that such emancipation was less important than the rising standard of living.

Wives and Property

Wives and Property PDF Author: Lee Holcombe
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945

Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945 PDF Author: June Purvis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135367094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 631

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Book Description
Women's History: Britain 1850-1945 introduces the main themes and debates of feminist history during this period of change, and brings together the findings of new research. It examines the suffrage movement, race and empire, industrialisation, the impact of war and womens literature. Specialists in their own fields have each written a chapter on a key aspect of womens lives including health, the family, education, sexuality, work and politics. Each contribution provides an overview of the main issues and debates within each area and offers suggestions for further reading. It not only provides an invaluable introduction to every aspect of womens participation in the political, social and economic history of Britain, but also brings the reader up to date with current historical thinking on the study of womens history itself.

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century England

Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-century England PDF Author: Joan Perkin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0415007712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.

Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700

Marriage, Separation, and Divorce in England, 1500-1700 PDF Author: K. J. Kesselring
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192666959
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
England is well known as the only Protestant state not to introduce divorce in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Only at the end of the seventeenth century did divorce by private act of parliament become available for a select few men and only in 1857 did the Divorce Act and its creation of judicial divorces extend the possibility more broadly. Aspects of the history of divorce are well known from studies which typically privilege the records of the church courts that claimed a monopoly on marriage. But why did England alone of all Protestant jurisdictions not allow divorce with remarriage in the era of the Reformation, and how did people in failed marriages cope with this absence? One part of the answer to the first question, Kesselring and Stretton argue, and a factor that shaped people's responses to the second, lay in another distinctive aspect of English law: its common-law formulation of coverture, the umbrella term for married women's legal status and property rights. The bonds of marriage stayed tightly tied in post-Reformation England in part because marriage was as much about wealth as it was about salvation or sexuality, and English society had deeply invested in a system that subordinated a wife's identity and property to those of the man she married. To understand this dimension of divorce's history, this study looks beyond the church courts to the records of other judicial bodies, the secular courts of common law and equity, to bring fresh perspective to a history that remains relevant today.