Law, Marriage, and Women’s Agency: Studies from the Anglo-American and Iranian Worlds

This issue presents a set of historical themes of vital importance to women’s lives: matters of marriage and divorce as well as visions of feminist reforms that circulated in national and transnational contexts. The authors thematically probe women’s responses to the legal dimensions enveloping their options, assess key moments of heightened feminist debate and reform around the mid-nineteenth century, and address the local inflections of transnational feminisms that sometimes undercut any presumption of global sisterhood. The collection highlights the workings of several different historical approaches to these common threads in a timeframe that extends from eighteenth-century England to 1970s North America. One author provides a detailed reading of ecclesiastical court records to reconstruct how English gentry wives in the eighteenth century used courts and their officials to protect their interests in contested matrimonial cases. Two of the authors adopt the biographical method to explore, respectively, new angles on debates about divorce in the early U.S. feminist movement and the opening of the bar to women in interwar England. A jointly authored article uses wide-ranging political and economic documents to reconstruct a missed era of heightened feminist debate when Australia was turning to self-government and manhood suffrage. We include as well a selection that performs a close reading of an iconic Iranian woman’s life narrative, written around 1914, to assess its place in subsequent Iranian feminist scholarly exegesis. Our last article, situated in 1970s North America, deals with feminist choices. It examines the confluence of circumstances that gave rise to the Organization for Non-Parents (NON), the first U.S. organization defending the rights of couples not to have children. This issue is rounded out by three excellent book review essays on related themes.

We open with Junko Akamatsu’s fascinating piece on “Revisiting Ecclesiastical Adultery Cases in Eighteenth-Century England.” Akamatsu offers a richly textured discussion of the Doctors’ Commons, an ecclesiastical court system that heard contested matrimonial cases. At stake in this early modern context was “separation” and not divorce, which could only be granted by Parliament. Akamatsu shows how significant the charge of adultery was to a wife’s reputation and welfare, concentrating on cases involving the gentry and those from the more wealthy middling strata. She uncovers important changes in legal strategies adopted by wives’ advocates and lawyers, what she labels a “new turn” in legal procedures in contrast to earlier eras. It was in 1770 that Lady Grosvenor, a defendant wife, prepared a “counter-allegation” charging her husband with infidelity. By pursuing the complexity of legal cases, including what might encourage a husband to drop a case, Akamatsu challenges received assumptions about women’s legal disabilities due to a presumed “double standard” criterion. Legal historians previously had argued that the woman needed to show not only infidelity but also cruelty for a successful charge of adultery. Yet Akamatsu demonstrates that the courts took the counter-charges of men’s adultery seriously, even without the added charge of cruelty. Through careful reading of legal histories—and bringing in neglected sources including counsels’ thoughts and strategies designed to invalidate husbands’ pleas—Akamatsu provides new insights into how wives negotiated the “patriarchal power” of England’s legal system. She brings challenging insights from legal history to the heart of women’s history.

We continue with the theme of divorce in Adam Tuchinsky’s “‘Woman and Her Needs’: Elizabeth Oakes Smith and the Divorce Question.” Through the career, life experiences, and writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, a poet, novelist, lecturer, and activist, Tuchinsky explores the controversial proposition of divorce in public debates in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, thereby offering an alternative perspective on early American feminism. While Smith was a “radical crusader” for women’s rights in general, she opposed divorce in particular. Her position, however, was a product of a distinct intersection of forces that has been largely overlooked in the literature on the U.S. women’s movement: the emergence of feminist organizing and the utopian socialism of Charles Fourier, the first socialist...