Welcome! A Brief Introduction
I'm Anise K. Strong, Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University and author of Prostitutes and Matrons in the Roman World (Cambridge, 2016). Currently, I'm working on a new research project, "Women's Divorce and Successful Societies," the first global comparative history of female-initiated divorces and their social consequences. I am doing four main case studies for this project: the Roman Empire from 100 BCE-300 CE, T’ang Dynasty China from 618-820 CE, the
Ottoman Empire from 1500-1700 CE, and Great Britain from 1857-1930 CE. Each of
these particular societies featured comparatively frequent wife-initiated legal
divorces, as well as a high level of economic prosperity, political success,
and social stability. While not unique, these four cultures are quite rare in
their legalization of women’s marital rights, particularly since they all
preceded or followed more restrictive and misogynist systems of marriage. By
comparing the evidence on divorce and marriage from these individual studies, I
hope to answer broader questions about the social significance of permissive
gender-neutral divorce legislation. Right now, that means digging through legal archives in search of information about why women divorced their husbands and how both the couples and the ex-wives managed their financial affairs.
But why should a general non-academic audience care about any of this? Well, at the moment, my case studies are turning up some fascinating stories about ordinary women who only appear in surviving written texts because of their divorce cases. These women endured dreadful marriages, took the initiative to leave their husbands, and then survived and often prospered financially while supporting themselves and in many cases their children in highly patriarchal, misogynist societies. If you want to know a bit about the historical family lives, comedies, and tragedies of women who weren't empresses or duchesses, this is one great way to start. I'll be posting regular highlights from my research here, beginning with the British and Roman women.
A brief note on the relevant laws in these two societies:
Roman women from 100 BCE-300 CE could generally divorce their husbands simply by declaring that they were, unless they had been married in an extremely rare old-fashioned ceremony. They lost all custody of their children, including those in the womb at the time of the divorce, but retained any property that they had brought into the marriage - their dowries. They had no right to financial support or alimony after the marriage. Men could also freely divorce their wives, and there's complicated legal doctrine on whether women's fathers could forcibly divorce them from their husbands (more on that later!)
British women, beginning in 1857, could divorce their husbands if they could prove his adultery _and_ either abandonment, cruelty, incest, bestiality, sodomy, or bigamy. What "abandonment" meant was not specified by the law but required at least 2 years of non-support, and was largely up to the whim of the first judge-in-ordinary of the divorce court, a "notoriously bad-tempered, confirmed bachelor" named Sir Cresswell Cresswell, who became famous for deciding his first 1000 divorce cases in 6 years. The other wrinkle was that the acrimonious couple were not allowed to "collude" in getting a divorce by faking adultery. Indeed, the divorce court had a special investigative team, the Queen's Proctor, to expose dubious claims, as depicted in the 1934 Astaire/Rogers film The Gay Divorcee, seen above.
But why should a general non-academic audience care about any of this? Well, at the moment, my case studies are turning up some fascinating stories about ordinary women who only appear in surviving written texts because of their divorce cases. These women endured dreadful marriages, took the initiative to leave their husbands, and then survived and often prospered financially while supporting themselves and in many cases their children in highly patriarchal, misogynist societies. If you want to know a bit about the historical family lives, comedies, and tragedies of women who weren't empresses or duchesses, this is one great way to start. I'll be posting regular highlights from my research here, beginning with the British and Roman women.
A brief note on the relevant laws in these two societies:
Roman women from 100 BCE-300 CE could generally divorce their husbands simply by declaring that they were, unless they had been married in an extremely rare old-fashioned ceremony. They lost all custody of their children, including those in the womb at the time of the divorce, but retained any property that they had brought into the marriage - their dowries. They had no right to financial support or alimony after the marriage. Men could also freely divorce their wives, and there's complicated legal doctrine on whether women's fathers could forcibly divorce them from their husbands (more on that later!)
British women, beginning in 1857, could divorce their husbands if they could prove his adultery _and_ either abandonment, cruelty, incest, bestiality, sodomy, or bigamy. What "abandonment" meant was not specified by the law but required at least 2 years of non-support, and was largely up to the whim of the first judge-in-ordinary of the divorce court, a "notoriously bad-tempered, confirmed bachelor" named Sir Cresswell Cresswell, who became famous for deciding his first 1000 divorce cases in 6 years. The other wrinkle was that the acrimonious couple were not allowed to "collude" in getting a divorce by faking adultery. Indeed, the divorce court had a special investigative team, the Queen's Proctor, to expose dubious claims, as depicted in the 1934 Astaire/Rogers film The Gay Divorcee, seen above.
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