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At a time when women were expected to be ignorant of money matters, divorce was to many women the catalyst that dramatized or called attention to the importance of economics in their lives. In the cases that I read from the New York Supreme Court from 1845 to 1875, 23 percent of the cases involving women were divorce cases. In the large majority of divorce cases, it was the woman who initiated the suit. Seventy percent of the divorce cases had a woman as the plaintiΩ; in only 30 percent was a man the plaintiΩ.As will become clear, the reason for this disparity was economic. Divorce cases provide an important measure of how important economics was in nineteenth-century women’s lives. Raised to be dependent upon men and conditioned to have—or to pretend to have— little or no understanding of money matters, women involved in divorce proceedings were forced to mention the unmentionable.The wife whose husband took care of his family financially (as his society said that he would) could comfortably accept the culture’s definition of money as a “vulgar” subject for a respectable woman to discuss. But the wife who had been abandoned by her husband, or who had been driven to leave him because of his abuse, or who had never been supported by him in the first place had to talk about how she was going to eat, and if she had children , how she was going to feed them. If she had brought property into the marriage, or if she had earned money during her marriage, she wanted to know if she could regain any of it, and if she had a means of earning her living, she wanted to be able to retain her own earnings. Even if she had family to help her, unless they were very wealthy, the woman separated from her husband needed to think about dollars and cents. The Economics of Divorce chapter eight In nineteenth-century New York the only ground for an absolute divorce (a vinculo matrimonii) by either party was adultery.1 And if one party was found guilty of adultery, he or she (the guilty party) could not remarry, but the innocent party could remarry. In New York it was possible to obtain a separation or limited divorce (a mensa et thoro)—after which neither party could remarry—on grounds of abandonment, desertion , or cruel and inhuman treatment. Men seldom sued for divorce on these grounds; in fact, all of the male plaintiΩs in the cases that I read brought suit on grounds of adultery. On the other hand, only a quarter of the women plaintiΩs sued for divorce on grounds of adultery. The principal reason why women sued for divorce on other grounds— abandonment or cruel and inhuman treatment, including physical abuse —when all they could obtain was a limited divorce or legal separation without the ability to remarry was to obtain monetary support. Since men usually did not need economic support from their wives, they sued for divorce only in order to get rid of an unwanted wife and/or to be free to remarry, which in New York State they could not do on any other grounds than adultery. Later in the century, divorces were sometimes collusive, that is, one of the parties pretended to have committed adultery so that both parties could obtain a divorce.2 However, in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, although one might be eager to prove adultery against one’s spouse, one would be unlikely to feign adultery oneself, since the party found guilty of adultery could not remarry, and if one wanted a limited divorce (which did not permit remarriage), one could obtain it on other grounds. Because of the social stigma attached to divorce, particularly for women, most women did not seek a divorce unless they had to. The working- or middle-class woman who was abandoned by her husband or who left him because of his abuse, needed to make the separation legal, if she did not have family to take her in, so that the court could compel her husband to support her and her children. Economic desperation was her principal motivation in seeking a legal separation or limited divorce. Under common law, if a man deserted his wife or if she left because of ill treatment, he was required to continue to support her.3 Job opportunities were few for women, and wages in...

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