Courtship, Coverture and Marital Cruelty: Historicising Intimate Violence in the Civil Courts

Abstract

What would the history of intimate violence look like if we traced it through the civil courts rather than the criminal courts? How did legal categories relevant to civil proceedings, such as a promise, seduction, consent and coverture, interact to create violable female bodies? In a field heavily dominated by studies of criminal trials, this paper redirects scholarly attention to civil actions used by women in the past to protest male violence and female suffering. This article reveals how the law continued to sanction intimate violence at the very moment when it purportedly sought to restrain it, through the case study of disgraced politician Myles McRae, who in the 1890s was petitioned by his wife Clara McRae for divorce on the grounds of marital cruelty and adultery, and whose mistress Ilma Vaughan then sued him for breach of promise of marriage and assault. The 1890s, much like the present, was a time when public space opened up to allow for discussion of gender violence and legal reform promised women change, yet intimate abuse continued to be legitimated through law. I argue that the law’s sanctioning of violence can best be explained through a more complex understanding of coverture – a doctrine that began not at the marital altar, as is usually claimed, but during courtship and whose effects persisted long after divorce and property reform dissolved the doctrine of marital unity. Thinking of coverture more as a constellation of ideas than as a block legal category allows us to more accurately assess its continuation at the very instance of its supposed dissolution.