In accordance with the contemporary re-evaluation of women’s status during the early-to-mid 1970s, there grew awareness that not only was domestic violence a deeply embedded social problem but one which demanded urgent confrontation. Further to the emergence of Women’s Aid…
Tag: marriage
Women’s History Month: Women , Credit and Debt in Early Modern Edinburgh
The role of women in the debt and credit relationships in early modern Scotland is one that is only beginning to be uncovered. My research uses information contained in the Register of Decreets and Deeds for the burgh of Edinburgh…
Women’s History Month: Gossip and Scandal
Just like today, the nineteenth century public loved a good scandal. Here is one taken from the Connaught Journal, 3 September 1832. The peace of two families and the feelings of their relatives, who are highly respectable, have been painfully…
Women’s History Month: Before there was Internet 4: Marriage Advertisements
Looking for love in the nineteenth century was often as complicated as it is today. Instead of looking for a soulmate online, men and women placed advertisements in their local paper. Here are some examples from the Irish Times. To…
Patriarchs, Power and Eighteenth Century Marriage
you reign my Eliza alone in mine (heart), & every sentiment of it, is subservient to you … as long as you love me, the most endearing word to my thoughts is wife, because it implies my possession & enjoyment…
Black History Month: Hidden lives and silent voices in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Caribbean island of Grenada.
In Britain it has always been a challenge to establish what sort of lives poorer people had during this period; the lives of black and mixed-race women in the British West Indies island of Grenada are even more difficult to…
Why don’t the girls propose?
The men are shy- the ladies cry Their minds they won’t disclose; If it be so, I’d like to know Why don’t the girls propose? At splendid balls, in dazzling halls amid a host o beaux, with speaking eye…
Married Women’s Property and Divorce in the 19th Century
In 1882, after a series of earlier reforms, the Married Women’s Property Act passed for England, Wales and Ireland, while Scotland had a less extensive Act in 1880 and another in 1881. The Act restored to married women the right…
No person may credit…
Before the Married Women’s Property Acts of the nineteenth century, the marriage law in England, Wales and Ireland removed a wife’s right to her own property, putting it under the control of her husband. Yet, the other side of this…