Under nineteenth-century marriage law a woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s – a principle known as ‘coverture’. Without her husband’s consent a wife was unable to make a will, sue or be sued. All her property became her husband’s, including anything she had owned before and brought to the marriage. And her husband had custody of their children.
A change came in 1870 with the Married Women’s Property Act, which permitted women to be the legal owners of any money they earned and to inherit property. And in 1884 the Matrimonial Causes Act denied a husband the right to lock up his wife if she refused to have sex with him – although it wasn’t ratified until 1891 after an incident which became known as the ‘Jackson Abduction’.
On 5 November 1887, Emily Hall, a respectable solicitor’s daughter, married Edmund Jackson, the feckless son of an army officer. The couple never lived together and on their wedding night, before they had the chance to consummate their marriage, Edmund left for New Zealand, telling Emily he would send for her once he and his friend Dixon had established themselves there as farmers.
But Emily decided she didn’t want to go to New Zealand after all, feeling that ‘it would be impossible for me to hope to endure the rough life of a colonial settler’.16 So she wrote to Edmund telling him this, adding that she no longer wanted any contact with him. The begging tone of his letters to her from New Zealand worried her and she suspected he had married her for her money rather than out of love. Edmund’s angry reply asserted his husbandly rights in no uncertain terms:
Do not make any mistake. There shall be a perfect understanding between us, but I will make it, not you. It is most ridiculous for you to say you will have this or that; it depends on whether I approve or no.17
Four years passed. Then, without telling Emily, Edmund returned to Britain. Having obtained a decree for restitution of conjugal rights, he tracked Emily down to the Lancashire village of Clitheroe, where she had been brought up and her family still lived, and he kidnapped her as she was leaving church one Sunday. He bundled her into a waiting carriage with such haste that he knocked the bonnet off her head, drove her to a house he had rented in Blackburn and locked her in. Outside the house, to stop her trying to escape, he planted a team of hired heavies. Emily’s friends tracked her down and demanded entry. When this was refused they called the police, but to no avail.
A crowd gathered outside the house and watched as supplies were delivered. On the morning after the abduction, reported The Times, ‘milk and the papers were taken in by means of a string let down from one of the bedroom windows, and, later on, all kinds of provisions were obtained in the same way. At noon a box of cigars was hoisted up to the garrison.’ On 11 March 1891, Edmund was forced to leave the house after Emily’s sister filed a charge of assault against him for injuries she’d sustained trying to defend Emily during the abduction. Even as he left, though, his heavies swarmed around the house waving sticks.
Emily was fortunate to come from a legally literate family. They filed a writ of habeas corpus, which, if granted, meant Emily could be brought before a court which ought to declare her detention unlawful. But on 16 March, the High Court rejected the application on the basis that, while generally the forcible detention of a subject by another was ‘prima facie illegal’, where the relation was that of husband and wife, different rules applied.
Infuriated, Emily’s family took the case to the Court of Appeal – and, amazingly, got a sympathetic hearing. The Court agreed that Edmund had no right to force his wife to live with him: the very idea was uncivilised and derived from what Lord Halsbury, delivering the first judgement, called ‘quaint and absurd dicta’. The judges suspected that Edmund had married Emily for her money, displaying the sort of predatory behaviour to which men were prone and from which women needed protecting.
Lord Halsbury’s judgement was a landmark because, notwithstanding its reflexive sexism, it rejects the idea of the ‘absolute dominion of the husband over the wife’, calling Edmund’s counsel’s defence of wife-beating ‘outrageous to common feelings of humanity’ and ‘inconsistent with the rights of free human creatures’. This echoed the language of contemporary women’s-rights campaigners, though Lord Halsbury went on to specify instances in which husbands might be entitled to use limited, temporary powers of restraint, if, for example, a woman ‘were on the staircase about to join some person with whom she intended to elope’.18
But while the educated middle classes had the freedom and resources to use the courts in this way, for working-class women in 1880 it was a different story. Their lives, based around laundry and childcare – six or more children was the norm – were exhausting and terrifyingly unpredictable. Money trickled in uncertainly and there was no safety net if it ran out. Everything (clothes, furniture, cooking and cleaning utensils) was in short supply. Any meat was fed to the man of the house as the breadwinner. As a result, girls growing up in working-class households were undernourished, prone to tuberculosis and other diseases, and less able to withstand the ravages of pregnancy and childbirth.
Many working-class women went into service. By 1901, 91.5 per cent of all English servants were women.19 Some started young: as late as 1911, more than 39,000 13- and 14-year-olds were working as servants. The 1870 Education Act had theoretically opened up avenues for women by making education a matter of state provision rather than the whimsical, unregulated gift of charities, churches and other voluntary associations. But many girls were unable to take advantage of school places because their families were poor. A child in service, rather than in school, meant financial security, a situation that is portrayed in Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical Lark Rise to Candleford sequence of novels:
As soon as a mother had even one daughter in service, the strain upon herself slacked a little. Not only was there one mouth less to feed, one less pair of feet to be shod, and a tiny space left free in the cramped sleeping quarters; but every month, when the girl received her wages, a shilling or more would be sent to ‘our Mum’.20
Most middle-class families had at least one servant. As the feminist historians Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser pithily observe: ‘For men, the dividing line between middle and working class was usually measured in income; for women, it lay in the difference between being a servant and being able to afford one.’21
Charles Booth estimated that 30 per cent of London families could not live on a man’s wages alone. In order to supplement their husbands’ earnings, working-class wives took on piecework – usually sewing or knitting – either at home or in attics or cellars supervised by a ‘sweater’. Abuse and malpractice in the ‘sweated work’ industry was rife, both at home and in factories. The extent of it was exposed by one of the late-Victorian period’s great whistleblowers and one of the most impressive activists of the era: Ada Nield Chew.
The second child in a family of thirteen, Chew was born on 28 January 1870 to William Nield, a brickmaker, and his wife Jane, in Audley, Staffordshire. At the age of eleven she left school to help look after her family, which included an epileptic younger sister; she fitted in paid work where she could.
After the family moved to Crewe in 1887, Chew found work in the Compton Brothers clothing factory. But it was miserable and exploitative, so in 1894 she sent the Crewe Chronicle a series of anonymous letters savagely criticising the pay and conditions