The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 allowed divorce to be granted by common law courts, recognized marriage as a contractual relationship, and granted women rights to inherit, control, and bequeath property. Caroline Norton’s lobbying efforts contributed to the act’s passing. The act established alimony, property rights, and limited custody rights for divorced women. The grounds for divorce remained narrow and controversial, but the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Cases gained respect for its impartiality. The act also led to the demise of Doctors’ Commons and modernized the legal profession.
The Matrimonial Causes Act was a landmark act of the British Parliament enacted in 1857, which made sweeping changes to existing divorce standards and granted women several important rights. Before the act was passed, divorce was only available to the wealthy, as it required either an ecclesiastical annulment or a private Act of Parliament, both lengthy and costly processes. The Matrimonial Causes Act recognized marriage as a contractual relationship, rather than a sacramental one and subject only to canon law, and allowed it to be dissolved in common law courts.
Before the Matrimonial Causes Act was passed, marriage in the UK deprived women of many of the rights they enjoyed when single, such as the right to inherit, control and bequeath property. In essence, a married woman’s identity merged with that of her husband, who had the legal right to control her, her property, and even her earnings. The institution of divorce as commonly understood in the modern Western world did not exist to protect women from abusive husbands. Instead, divorces were available only through canon law proceedings in an arcane institution called Doctors’ Commons, or through private bills passed by Parliament, requiring public debate in the House of Commons. Relatively few divorces have been granted by either method, and of these, only a fraction have been granted to women.
Caroline Norton (1808 – 1877), a popular and influential member of British society in the mid-19th century, was locked into a loveless and abusive marriage and left her husband. An accomplished author, she attempted to make a living off her writing, but her husband successfully sued to exercise his legal claim to all of her earnings. She lobbied vigorously her friends in Parliament to pass legislation that would recognize and protect the rights of married and divorced women, and the enactment of the Marriage Lawsuits Act is widely recognized to have been largely due to her efforts.
The Matrimonial Causes Act not only established the concept of marriage as a contract subject to the jurisdiction of secular law, the dissolution of which can be initiated by either party, but it is also notable for establishing rights for married women who had hitherto not they had been recognised. For example, divorced or estranged husbands could be ordered to pay alimony to their ex-wives, and both married and divorced women could inherit, control, and bequeath property themselves, without their husbands’ approval. Divorced women’s earnings were protected and women were given limited custody rights for their children. As trivial as these rights may seem in modern Western society, they were revolutionary in mid-19th-century England.
Both before and after the writ was passed, the grounds for divorce were narrow and severe, almost always requiring the plaintiff to demonstrate adulterous conduct on the part of the defendant. The act did little to change this; indeed, a woman seeking divorce not only had to prove her husband’s adultery, but also that she had committed bigamy, desertion, cruelty, or incest. A man who filed for divorce under the act, on the other hand, only had to prove his wife’s adultery.
Despite being unabashedly leaning in favor of men’s rights, the act was highly controversial and it was feared that making divorce more easily accessible to more people, as well as broadening the scope of women’s rights, would seriously damage the institution of marriage . However, the court established to hear divorce cases, the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Cases, has earned wide respect for the integrity and impartiality with which it has operated. In fact, of the more than 1,000 divorces it granted during its first three years of operation, only one was overturned on appeal. The court has also gained widespread popularity among women as a protector of their rights.
The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 can be credited with initiating a number of significant changes in British case law, including the demise of the Doctors’ Commons, the modernization of the legal profession itself, and the unification of the legal systems of England and Wales. Its impact on British society, both by making divorce much more accessible and by ending the system of recognizing married women as the property of their husbands, is invaluable.
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