1st Edition
Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England
The 'bonds of matrimony' describes with cruel precision the social and political status of married women in the nineteenth century. Women of all classes had only the most limited rights of possession in their own bodies and property yet, as this remarkable book shows, women of all classes found room to manoeuvre within the narrow limits imposed on them. Upper-class women frequently circumvented the onerous limitations of the law, while middle-class women sought through reform to change their legal status. For working-class women, such legal changes were irrelevant, but they too found ways to ameliorate their position. Joan Perkin demonstrates clearly in this outstanding book, full of human insights, that women were not content to remain inferior or subservient to men.
Introduction
1 WOMEND AND THE LAW
I MARRIAGE A LA MODE
2 A FAMILY ON THE THRONE
3 ONE LAW FOR THE RICH
4 THE GLORIOUS LICENS OF A WIFE
5 THE PROVOKED WIFE
II RESPECTABLES AND THE ROUGHS
6 ANOTHER LAW FOR THE POOR
7 A LIFE OF WILLING SACRIFICE
8 ROUGH AND READY WOMEN
9 THE COUNTRY WIFE
III THE GILDEN CAGE
10 THE CRUSADE AGAINST MARRIAGE
11 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE
12 A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN
13 THE BATTLE OF JERICHO
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Biography
Joan Perkin
'It drives a coach and four through most preconceptions about those allegedly stuffy Victorians.' – Observer
' ... lively and interesting. Its strength is that it gets beyond unsatisfactory generalizations about marriage by approaching it at three social levels ... As a result the author succeeds in putting women and marriage into a sharper perspective than is often done ...' – History
