MARRIAGE BREAKDOWN

Few marriages broke down irretrievably in the nineteenth century. Death of a spouse was more likely to bring about the end of a marriage than separation or divorce. It is not until after the First World War that Europeans began to divorce on a mass scale.

From women's point of view, the existence of legal divorce was not neces­sarily advantageous. There were few states which treated women and men as equals in the divorce courts. The double-standard, whereby a woman's adultery was judged more harshly than that of a man's, was enshrined in divorce legislation in England, France, and in those states under the jurisdic­tion of the Napoleonic Code. Adultery by a wife was regarded as a greater threat to marriage because of the potential for pregnancy and the birth of a child with an uncertain paternity. Thus, female adultery struck at the heart of the aristocratic or bourgeois marriage on account of the importance of inheritance. By the nineteenth century a woman's adultery was also regarded as a crime against marriage and in turn, the social order. According to one speaker in the British Parliament in 1800:

All other injuries, when put in the scale of... the crime of adultery... are as noth­ing. Is there any other private wrong which produces so many public consequences? The sanctity of marriage, of a contract which is the very foundation of the social world, is violated — religious and moral duties made a sport of — the peace and happi­ness of families utterly broken up — the protection of daughters destroyed, and their character, though innocent, disparaged in opinion by their mother's dishonour.⁶⁰

The majority of divorce actions on the grounds of adultery were brought by men, but this is partly a reflection of an iniquitous law and partly an indica­tion that men were less tolerant of their wives' infelicities than vice versa. The adulterous woman was a dangerous woman and, with the demise of the disciplinary powers of the church courts by the nineteenth century, the civil courts took on the function of controlling women's sexuality.

When Anna Cords was divorced in 1835 by her husband Johann, a Hamburg ropemaker, on the grounds of adultery, she was condemned not only for the act of adultery with her husband's apprentice — who was also the lodger in the Cords' household — but also for her alleged failure to conform to bourgeois liberal definitions of ideal womanhood. In the suit filed by her husband, Anna was portrayed as being in possession of an unruly sexuality which the divorce court was called upon to regulate. Johann described in court how, early one morning after hearing his wife creep out of bed, he followed her to the lodger's room where he discovered the pair in bed together. Upon being confronted by her husband, Anna reportedly jumped out of the lodger's bed and cried: ‘Ah, you gave me a fright, what are you doing here!' Johann, ‘an extremely calm man', was so dismayed he did nothing except cry out in pain the words ‘Mother! Mother!' Anna ‘openly and unashamedly confessed that she and the apprentice loved one another and could not bear to be apart.' In an argument with the apprentice, Johann ‘exercised his rights as head of the household' and ejected him from the living quarters. Some days later, after Anna had left home to live with her lover in neighbouring Altona, the three parties were summoned to police headquarters. The apprentice was requested to leave town for a year and Anna was ‘reminded of her duty to return to her husband and to care for her children'. However, Anna and her lover disregarded these injunctions whereby Johann filed for a divorce which he duly received.⁶¹ Johann's honour was restored; Anna was publicly chastised for her unruly sexuality.

Women were the main beneficiaries of the liberalisation of divorce laws across Europe from the 1850s, which not only extended the availability of divorce but also widened the grounds on which a divorce could be obtained. The woman was, more often than not, the weaker partner in a marriage in economic and physical terms. She was more likely to be the victim of domestic violence, more likely to be deserted, and women had fewer eco­nomic and cultural resources to survive alone. In London, for instance, a busy port and enlisting centre, the plight of the deserted wife was a common one, with a significant proportion of applications for poor relief at the end of the eighteenth century coming from women abandoned by husbands ‘gone to sea' or ‘gone abroad'.⁶² The liberalisation of divorce was a response to the ideology of domesticity and the belief that women should be protected from male abuses such as drunkenness and sexual promiscuity. Divorce laws, comments Roderick Phillips, were ‘part of a complex of paternalistic legisla­tion that sought to protect women from the most harmful implications of their inferior status without attempting to change their status significantly.'⁶³ Whatever the intention, divorce provided a clean break, the possibility of custody and financial support for any children, and it permitted a woman to remarry. Separation, by contrast, left women in a state of limbo, unable to remarry. It comes as no surprise then, that women consistently formed the majority of plaintiffs — up to 70 per cent — in divorce actions.

Arguably it was the inclusion of cruelty as a legitimate ground for a divorce which was most advantageous for nineteenth-century women. Whether a woman married for love or for material reasons she did not anticipate ill- treatment. It is a fallacy that women fatalistically accepted the ‘rule of thumb' which, in England at least, permitted a husband to physically chastise an ‘unruly' wife with an instrument no thicker than that digit.

Antagonistic marriages were often the result of a conflict between a man's expectations of patriarchal dominance and a woman's desire for companion­ship and respect for her economic and domestic role. Changes in women's economic position could be seen as precipitating marital strife at the same time as some men were struggling to maintain their tenuous hold on their masculine identity. The motif of the ‘struggle for the breeches' found in popular literature and songs, as well as political rhetoric, rather crudely rep­resented plebeian marriage as a constant battle of wills, whereby men who were tormented by unruly and assertive wives were justified in using physical force to keep them in check. In the words of one popular song, ‘A Fool's Advice to Henpeck'd Husbands':

When your wife for scolding finds pretences, oh

Take the handle of a broom,

not much thicker than your thumb,

and thwack her till you bring her to her senses, oh.⁶⁴

Yet, ballads which condoned wife-torture were more a commentary on men's unease than a true representation of antagonistic marriage. Certainly, wife­beaters existed, if rarely as cruel and vicious as those depicted in popular songs — such as the husband who was advised to nail his wife's tongue to a growing tree.⁶⁵ Some did believe such physical chastisement was acceptable, but in many of the cases heard in the courts, physical abuse was used by men in their frustration at their own inability to fulfil the role expected of them. Domestic violence might also be interpreted as a sign that women were chal­lenging male authority rather than as an indication of a decline of women's status within marriage. The overwhelming preponderance of women as plaintiffs in civil cases and divorce suits involving domestic violence suggests that it was women who were more anxious to question a form of marriage relationship which permitted men to abuse their authority.

Evidence from Britain, France and Germany suggests that men beat their wives when they felt their authority was being undermined. In Glasgow and the north-west of England as well as in parts of rural Germany, artisans in the traditional trades were more likely to beat their wives than other groups, a pattern that may be partially explained by the insecurity of this sector of employment especially in the first few decades of the century. Typical was the case of Agnes and Dominicus Mottmann whose divorce was granted in 1853 in the Rhineland. Dominicus was a master carpenter who had taken to drinking and mistreating his wife. Mottmann apparently felt himself under threat from all sides. His business was in tatters as a result of his drinking and at home he was outnumbered by his wife and her daughter from a former marriage. The couple argued about domestic issues, he rained insults on the women, especially when his wife ‘remonstrated with him', destroyed house­hold items and threw his dinner in the face of his wife.⁶⁶ The couple lived in a part of Germany undergoing economic crisis, particularly in the artisanal sector which was subject to overcrowding and competition as a result of the dismantling of the guilds. Industry was virtually non-existent.⁶⁷ Further south, in Gottingen, similar tensions focused on the decline of artisanal employment and the rise in work for women, predominantly in domestic service, which had a corrosive effect on married life.⁶⁸ Although miserable wages for women in most areas of work meant that women were forced to ‘trade support for violence', those women who took their husbands to court were prepared to forgo a bad marriage in the knowledge that they would be able to manage alone, at least for a time.⁶⁹ In Basel, Switzerland, at the end of the century, women increasingly found work in textile factories and their wages played a significant role in the household finances, but women as wage-earners demanded more from their husbands and a more equal partner­ship. When the marriage became intolerable their economic independence allowed women to take the initiative and petition for divorce since they could at least envisage life without a husband.⁷⁰

Plebeian marriages were regarded by the middle classes as an ‘incompre­hensible region', ‘where many women were neither ladylike nor deferential, where men struggled to hold on to their authority over them, where “sexual antagonism” was openly acknowledged.'⁷¹ If the middle classes had looked more closely, however, they may have seen more that was familiar to them than they liked to acknowledge. The violent and hysterical outbursts of men like Dominicus Mottmann bear a close relation to the ‘paroxysms of excitement' of Robert Bostock; the difference was merely the public nature of lower-class conflict. Women of all social classes who found themselves trapped in a tyrannical marriage experienced similar problems, but by 1914 most European states had provided them with a means of escape.