Book launch: Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales: For Wives Alone

In this seminar we will be celebrating both the launch of an important new book in the fields of legal, social, women’s and economic history, and an unlikely writing partnership between two women born sixty years apart and who never met. The book Deserted Wives and Economic Divorce in 19th-Century England and Wales: For Wives Alone published in November 2024, was started by Anderson in the early 1990s using extensive research of provincial and metropolitan daily newspapers at the British Library's Colindale Newspaper Reading Room and was completed in 2023 by Aston, employing new scholarship, and digital and genealogical sources and methodologies previously unavailable.

Deserted Wives charts the creation and implementation of Section 21 of the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, perhaps the most radical piece of legislation passed in the nineteenth century. This small piece of legislation gave a married woman who had been deserted by her husband and who was maintaining herself, total control over her property as well as the ability to contract, to sue and be sued, and to make a last will and testament; legal status reverted to that of a feme sole. Moreover, she could apply to her local magistrate or police court and, for just a few shillings, gain these legal protections. As Deserted Wives reveals, tens of thousands of women did just that, making it by far the most utilised section of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857. Despite their importance to women in the mid-nineteenth century, with no central registry of cases and the destruction of many magistrates’ court records, section 21 orders had remained largely unexamined until now. The launch of Deserted Wives will present a new understanding of the economic, social and legal agency of ordinary women in the mid nineteenth century and honour the contribution of a pioneering female historian, Professor Olive Anderson. 

Jennifer Aston is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria University, UK. A historian by training, she previously held the EHS Eileen Power Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research and research positions at the universities of Oxford and Hull before joining Northumbria as a Lecturer in History in 2017 and moving to the Law School in 2024. Her research focuses on gender history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where she explores the similarities and differences experienced by women and men as they navigated formal financial and legal institutions. She is currently running the ESRC funded project ‘A New Methodological Approach to the History of Divorce 1857-1923’. She has published widely on gender and small business ownership, bankruptcy, and the law, including her first monograph Female Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century England: Engagement in the Urban Economy (Palgrave, 2016), edited collections Women and the Land 1500-1900 (Boydell, 2019) and Female Entrepreneurs in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Global Perspective (Palgrave, 2020), and in journals including The Economic History Review, Business History and the Journal of Legal History.

Olive Anderson born on 27 March 1926, the youngest daughter of Pentecostal Minister Donald Gee and his wife Ruth. In 1944 she was awarded a scholarship by St Hugh’s College, Oxford to study History, graduated in 1947 and completed her BLitt in 1949.  In 1950 she was appointed to an assistant lectureship at London University’s Westfield College (now Queen Mary University of London) where she rose to become Professor of History and Honorary Research Fellow before her retirement in 1991.  In 1954 she married Matthew S. Anderson, later Professor of International History at the London School of Economics with whom she had two daughters, Rachel and Harriet. Originally a historian of warfare, Anderson reimagined the field of military history as one that no longer had to focus on campaigns and weaponry, but could instead incorporate the social, cultural, and economic impacts of warfare. This ambition was realised in her first monograph, Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics During the Crimean War, published in 1967. From here she became one of the founding scholars of the field of medical humanities, writing Suicide in Victorian and Edwardian England (OUP 1987), a work that was praised by The Lancet and The London Review of Books as well as leading history journals. She was a prolific historian, publishing in The Economic History Review, Historical Journal, Past & Present, The English Historical Review and Victorian Studies among others. Anderson’s life as a female historian is itself a history and her achievements were recognised through her inclusion in the Institute of Historical Research’s ‘London’s Women Historians: A Celebration and A Conversation’ exhibition and conference in 2017. She passed away on 31 December 2015. 

Professor Jane Humphries is Centennial professor of Economic History at LSE and a Fellow of All Souls College. Her research interests focus on labour markets, industrialization, and the links between the family and the economy. She has published extensively on gender, the family, and the history of women's work, and is also interested in the causes and consequences of economic growth and structural change. Her book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011) draws on numerous autobiographies by working men and uses innovative methodology to illuminate aspects of children's lives otherwise inaccessible on the basis of more conventional sources.  The book received the Gyorgi Ranki Prize for an outstanding book in European Economic History by the Economic History Association in 2011 and formed the basis of a BBC4 documentary, The Children Who Built Victorian Britain, which Professor Humphries co-authored and presented. Professor Humphries was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for Services to Social Science and Economic History in the New Year's Honours 2018."

Dr Alana Harris is a Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural and Gender History at King’s College London. Alongside Laura Carter in 2017 she organised the ‘London’s Women’s Historians’ symposium and portrait installation (which is still hanging in the stairwell at the IHR), and highlighted Professor Olive Anderson’s scholarship within that pioneering cohort.