Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales Event
- Time:
- 12:30-14:00
- Date:
- 2024-12-12 00:00:00
- Venue:
- Building 4, Law School Staff Room 2055
Event details
Based on her latest book, published by Hart Publishing in November, ,’ Jennifer Aston will be talking about Section 21 of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and its significant impact on previously invisible married women in the 19th century.
Tens of thousands of women used this little-known section of the Act to apply for orders from local magistrates' courts to reclaim their rights of testation, inheritance, property ownership, and (dependent on local franchise qualifications) ability to vote. By examining the orders that were made and considering the women who applied for them, the book challenges the mistaken belief that Victorian England and Wales were nations of married, cohabiting couples.
The detailed statistical analysis and rich case studies examined provide a totally new perspective on the legal status and experiences of married women in England and Wales. Although many thousands of orders were granted between 1858 and 1900, their details remain unknown and unexamined, primarily because census records did not consistently record dissolved marriages and there is no central index of applications made.
Speaker information
is an Associate Professor in Law. She joined Northumbria University as a Lecturer in History in 2017, before moving to Northumbria Law School in 2024. She previously held the EHS Eileen Power Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research and research positions at the universities of Oxford and Hull. She is also an Associate Member of the Centre for Workforce Futures at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
Her research interests include gender and small business ownership, bankruptcy, and the law. Apart from the book that is the subject of her talk, she is the author of Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy (Palgrave, 2016).
She has published widely on the interaction between gender and legal and financial institutions, including the edited collections Women and the Land 1500-1900 (Boydell, 2019) and Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2020), and articles in journals including Economic History Review, Business History and the Journal of Legal History. Her article, ‘Petitions to the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes: A New Methodological Approach to the History of Divorce, 1857–1923’ in the Journal of Legal History was Highly Commended by the judges of the British Records Association’s Harley Prize 2022.