A New York divorce is in itself a diploma of virtue- Edith Wharton, "The Other Two"

It's important to realize that the concept of a no-fault divorce only really gained traction in the twentieth century, to obtain divorce through family law in both Britain and the US often a wife had to prove the misdeeds of the husband and have these accusations stand up to the court's scrutiny. In both American and British cases, the hypothetical middle-class woman would have to jump through a similar series of hoops and obstacles.

In Britain, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 removed divorce from the ecclesiastical courts and into the civil courts. Further acts of Parliament gave women access to their own property and wages. This lowered the costs of divorce and provided some degree of legal standards to justify the dissolving of a marriage. However, the social strictures against divorce remained in place, and the displacement of divorce into civil law sharpened the social censure of divorce and divorcées. Divorce and the destruction of the family became a hot topic social issue as the number of divorces increased due to these reforms. The divorce laws also managed to use adultery as grounds for a divorce. The Matrimonial Causes Act placed the burden of proof on women to show:

incestuous Adultery or of Bigamy with Adultery, or of Rape, or of Sodomy or Bestiality, or of Adultery coupled with such Cruelty as without Adultery would have entitled her to a divorce a mensa et thoro, or of Adultery coupled with Desertion, without reasonable excuse, for Two years or upwards.

For middle-class British women, divorce often entailed an airing of their dirty laundry and opened themselves up to a sexual standard of purity which was often difficult in reality to uphold. Physical abuse could also be a cause for a partial divorce, but again the burden of proof was on the female plaintiff. As with sexual transgressions, the law presumed a degree of idealized innocence on the part of women that was very hard to live up to.

The US had a similar process of civil control over marriage law and a familiar pattern emerged in that the court would scrutinize the claims of the plaintiff very closely. US jurisprudence was more liberal in its application of marital cruelty than British courts but they shared many of the same sexual precepts as their Transatlantic counterparts. One 1887 Oregon case upheld by its Supreme Court, the lower-court judge instructed the jurors when it came to assessing alimony, to take the plaintiff’s past history as a prostitute into account because:

if she is a woman of coarse manner, gross in her associations, and impudent, careless, and reckless, in regard to conduct and demeanor, these circumstances you may take into account in assessing damages; such a woman is not inured to the same extent by a breach of promise of marriage that one more confiding, retiring modest would be.

Various social pressure groups found the increases in divorces an issue with which to castigate the social ills of society. For example, the counterintuitively-named New England Divorce Reform League pushed for a greater clamping down and restriction of liberal divorce laws. The League used religious leaders and other social elites to pressure both Congress and local state legislatures to homogenize divorce laws and make them more “scientific” and certain. This had the effect of raising the level of the burden of proof for female plaintiffs.

These various laws put middle-class women into a number of particular binds that upper-class and working-class women lacked. Many of the social reform movements, which castigated divorce as symptomatic of a wider a social illness, were led by the emerging middle classes. Being a divorcée could be tantamount to a social death in these networks if the grounds for divorce were not clear-cut. The civil laws that gave women access to their property or wages were often ill-suited to middle-class women who possessed neither a job nor an estate (and, it should be noted, working-class and elite women often lacked complete access to these as well).

Ironically, the vagaries of international law would have made it easier for a British woman to gain a divorce in America and vice-versa. Canada, for example, had a very strict divorce laws and many Canadian women would go across to New York state to obtain a divorce. Even though New York had one of the strictest divorce laws in the US, many Ontarians would set up a brief residence there to get their marriage dissolved. Although traveling to Britain to obtain a divorce was out of the reach for middle-class American women, many would migrate to states like Illinois or Utah to obtain a divorce.

The novels of Edith Wharton, a prominent divorcée herself, provide some of the insight into how the early twentieth century perceived the Victorian culture of divorce. Her trenchant critiques of legality of divorce and the social hypocrisy surrounding its implementation are borne out by an examination of how divorce laws evolved during the latter half of the nineteenth century. The various legal and social barriers towards divorce demanded that women be of an almost impossibly high moral character (and financial means) if they were to survive divorce with their reputations unscathed.

Sources

Basch, Norma. Framing American Divorce From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1999.

Griswold, Robert L. "Law, Sex, Cruelty, and Divorce in Victorian America, 1840-1900." American Quarterly (1986): 721-745.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Phillips, Roderick. Untying the Knot: A Short History of Divorce. Cambridge [U.K.]: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Poovey, Mary. "Covered But Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act." *Feminist Studies *(1988): 467-485.

Probert, Rebecca. "Double Standard of Morality in the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, The." Anglo-American Law Review. 28 (1999): 73-86.