delanceyplace.com 9/12/13 - divorce customs ancient and not-so-ancient
In today's encore selection - from I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage by Susan Squire. Divorce customs ancient and not-so-ancient:
"For nearly a thousand years, an Englishman sick of his wife could slip a halter around her neck, lead her to market -- the cattle market -- and sell her to the highest bidder, often with her willing participation. This informal route to divorce for the lower classes lasted, amazingly, until at least 1887. ... [As reported by non-fiction authors Lawrence Stone in The Family Sex and Marriage and Samuel Menefee in Wives for Sale] a drunken husband sells his wife in the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), much to the astonishment of contemporary critics. Oblivious to the informal unlawful marriage and divorce customs of the less literate brethren ('wife-sale' dates back to c. 1073), they could not imagine such a thing happening on British soil in the nineteenth century, even though popular broadsides depicting the practice (one of which illustrates the cover of Menefee's book) were still being produced and widely circulated during that same century. ...
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A contemporary French print of an English wife sale, at a cattle market |
author: |
Susan Squire |
title: |
I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage |
publisher: |
Bloomsbury USA, New York |
date: |
Copyright 2008 by Susan Squire |
pages: |
36-44, 227 |
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