Legal Fictions: D-I-V-O-R-C-E

Last week in the comments to the WWW Wednesday post, Brenda Clough and Sherwood Smith got into a discussion on divorce in earlier times. Sherwood observed:

Divorce is all tied up with women’s rights.

Indeed it is, because while divorce means that a woman can legally leave a bad marriage, the changes in women’s rights and economic status were necessary to make leaving a practical alternative for more people. The two things go hand in hand.

In fact, one of the reasons behind the Women’s Temperance...