Living in Sin
Page 46
similarities, and this fact had many consequences.
Consequences
Despite legal and social disabilities, not all the results of cohabitation
were negative. Couples who cohabited voluntarily enumerated several
advantages to explain their choices. For one thing, they had more privacy
and less interference from church and state, and they also paid no fees. For
another, both men and women believe they could leave bad relationships
more easily than marriages. Though this freedom did not always materialise
in practice, the ability to escape a failed union in Victorian England was
rare, due to the strict divorce laws, and, consequently, prized. In addition,
as radicals pointed out, women also evaded the legal effects of coverture. In
fact, by the end of the century, radical groups lionised pioneering women
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more than their male partners, and such groups acted as alternative social
support in case of exile from family and society.
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living in sin
Stil , many of the consequences were problematic, especial y for
women. Social ostracism was immediate with any open breach of the moral
code, though this was usual y not total for women and less serious for men.
All the same, a ‘fallen’ woman became entirely dependent on her ‘protector’
and subject to great anxieties for her own and her children’s futures. The
lack of social support was related to the economic risks of cohabitation for
women. Women had few job prospects and bore children, leaving them
far more vulnerable to poverty. A poor woman with a well-off lover might
climb out of the working class and see her children do much better than
she could otherwise have hoped, but she also might receive no financial
help at al . In short, the risks were considerable, and the success stories
were exceptional. The relative powerlessness of women was especial y
evident in men’s greater reluctance to marry in all groups of cohabitees
and in cross-class unions, where the disadvantages of class and gender
combined. Only a few unusual women, late in the century, broke free from
convention without great financial and social cost. Feminist wariness of
sexual experimentation must be understood in the context of these grave
disabilities.
Of course, these consequences differed by class. Working-class
couples had more social leeway, but came up against financial constraints
in all types of cohabitation, especial y adulterous unions, since the men
could seldom provide for two families. In these situations, one of the
families, usual y the illegitimate one, suffered from want, often ending in
the workhouse. The constant interaction between cohabiting poor couples
and the Poor Law authorities, in fact, showed how difficult these constraints
could be; the magistrates dealt with illegitimate families in a bewildering
array of situations. These laws, in combination with the harsh Poor Laws,
left JPs with limited options for deserted women and children.
The legal and economic consequences intertwined and made the
situation more complex. Women who were not wives lost legal standing
and could not enforce a husband’s duty to provide, though a limited
responsibility for illegitimate children existed despite the New Poor Law.
Nevertheless, the legal difficulties at the assize level and even some police
courts tended to fall on men and did not exclude those in the middle and
upper classes. Judges, in particular, blamed men for cohabitation and
believed men should support female cohabitees and any children they had
fathered. The courts tried to uphold male promise-keeping and domesticated
masculinity and, at times, ignored female unchastity. Such a stand at times
put them in conflict with local Justices of the Peace, who differed with high
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
court judges on how to deal with some types of cohabitation, especial y
bigamies. And the conflict did not end there. When judges did react with
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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conclusion
strictness, as in violence cases or in illegal marriages, juries often defied
them. Some men (and women) were able to use these disagreements to
evade punishment for flouting marriage laws. Interestingly, those who
got more sympathy were the poor, since they could plead ignorance and
necessity more plausibly.
The religious consequences of cohabitation were also mixed. On
the one hand, the Anglican church enjoyed a virtual monopoly on valid
marriages from 1753 to 1836 and thus fought any reforms to loosen the
marital regime. Indeed, the expression ‘living in sin’ reflects the established
church’s view of any couple dissenting from the strict marriage laws.
Church leaders led the charge against divorce reform, changes to affinity
and consanguinity laws, and any further secularisation of marriage. As a
result, some poor couples resented the power of the church and its fees and
avoided marriage altogether, and middle-class couples married elsewhere.
Similarly, reformers often saw the church as a major obstacle to ‘sensible’
marriage and divorce laws, since the church insisted on defining marriage
as a sacrament, and, thus, indissoluble. In this way, the church drove
otherwise conventional people out of the fold. On the other hand, some
churches, like dissenting congregations and the Catholic church, chipped
away at the Anglican monopoly of defining marriage, helping to change
it. In addition, even within the church, vicars often waived their fees to
help the poor, and energetic clergymen could be the best friends of women
with reluctant partners; more than once, church pressure brought a man to
the altar. Some women may well have been grateful for the help. Overal ,
however, the power of the church in influencing people’s views of marriage
declined; even when couples remained firm believers, they challenged the
clergy’s interpretation of scripture, as with affinal marriages.
Cohabitation also had a strong effect on family, friends, and wider
communities. Marriages, except in rare instances, were joyful occasions,
but responses to irregular unions were highly ambivalent. Of course, some
people rejected all those who lived ‘outside the law’, but these were the
exceptions. Most families and friends agreed that marriage was ‘better’, but
they were willing to widen the definition of marriage to include bigamous,
affinal, and some consanguineous and adulterous unions, as they had done
> (at times legal y) before 1753. Though unenthusiastic, working-class families
accepted irregular spouses, and took in daughters and illegitimate offspring
if necessary. Even middle-class society made exceptions, as with marriage
with a deceased wife’s sister; many otherwise strict moralists disputed
the laws of affinity. In these situations, parents and siblings (especial y
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sisters) were vital y important; female kin rarely entirely deserted ‘erring’
daughters and sisters. Cohabiting unions often il ustrated the continuing
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living in sin
importance of nuclear and even extended families, especial y in times of
trouble. Family members could not prevent an irregular union, but they
could influence its duration, success, and the fate of women and children
if the union failed.
The relationship between parents and children could also be complex.
Of course, children whose parents ‘passed’ as married might never know
the difference, blending in with other poor children seamlessly. Only if
the family faced legal problems or had to rely on the Poor Law authorities
would the lack of marriage lines intrude. Stil , illegitimate children had no
legal standing. They were far more likely to be born in the workhouse, a
serious stigma, and they also had no automatic right to paternal support.
They, then, faced desertion by their fathers (and sometimes mothers). In
the poor, this might mean that the child would be shuttled between state
care, charities, and foster homes, as well as living with various relatives,
a thoroughly unsettled home life.1 In better-off families, legitimate
relatives could fight the children for any legacies, unless their parents had
worded their wil s careful y. On some occasions, siblings sued each other
over inheritances; this was particularly likely when some siblings were
legitimate and others illegitimate. Though some families blended together
wel , illegitimacy complicated the family dynamic.
Two situations showed particular difficulties. First, in adulterous
unions, children might well resent the intrusion of a ‘homewrecker’ as
a step-parent; the Frederic children, for instance, sharply disliked their
father’s second family, the children of Kate Lyon.2 Though some adulterous
stepmothers and fathers were popular, like Margaret Gillies, others were
not. In addition, the state’s disapproval of adulterous unions meant that
a woman might lose custody of her children, not being a ‘proper person’
to raise them; this even happened to a rare father, like Percy Shelley, who
did not see his children with Harriet after his elopement. Second, mixed-
class unions had potential to help children, yet, for the most part, these
offspring did not have the same opportunities as their legitimate peers.
Many, like the children of Benjamin Smith, were considerably richer than
they would have been if they had grown up among their poor mothers’
kin, but few fathers were as generous as Smith. Most did not give their
illegitimate children the same status as themselves, just better than their
mothers’. In some ways, these children fitted neither class of their parents,
not as low as their mothers and not as high as their fathers, a confusing
situation.3 Cohabitation had legal, economic, and emotional consequences
for all family members; because they were the most vulnerable, children
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saw these consequences most starkly, for good or il .
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
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conclusion
Implications
Cohabitation was not widespread, but it was also not shockingly exceptional,
and the majority of people accommodated themselves to at least some of its
forms. This conclusion complicates common assumptions about the divide
between the respectable and unrespectable poor. Poor families needed each
other too much to be too nice about the matter and, in any case, ‘passing’
as married was fairly easy, especial y in urban areas, so many cohabitees
would have blended into their neighbourhoods with little ado. Also,
people moved in and out of respectability, depending on circumstances
and sometimes luck. A former mistress might inherit a bond, use it as a
dowry, and attract a respectable husband; an adulterous couple might be
enabled to marry by the death of a spouse. These couples regained some
social standing, even in the middle classes. On the other hand, couples
could slide down the social scale if the courts invalidated their marriages,
and poorer women might slip from cohabitee to prostitute in short order.
A simple dichotomy is not adequate to embrace this complicated social
terrain, even within the poorest groups.
In addition, the experience of these couples in the nineteenth century
showed that changes over time in cohabitation were only partly to do with
changes in behaviour. In the early part of the century, marital nonconformity
peaked and a sizeable minority of families had illegitimacies or cohabiting
relationships. After mid-century, the number of such couples declined, and
families admitted to irregular unions far less often. But not all of this change
was numerical; some couples continued to live together but simply stopped
talking about it openly. Similarly, in the better-off classes, the end of the
century was a time of more open challenge to marriage, rather than the
beginning, but more in words rather than actions. Thus, as many historians
have shown, marital choices did not necessarily follow the rhetoric about
marriage; indeed, discretion and hypocrisy often masked freedom in
practice, and vice versa. In short, the prescriptive language defined what
was ‘normal’ one way, while people’s behaviour defined it another. One of
the arguments of this book, then, is that historians need to look at what
people actual y did as well as what they said, to understand social change.
Cohabitation also comments on the relationship of the English state
to family formation. The English marriage laws were a mix of religious and
secular traditions, cemented by precedent and common law. Consequently,
the enforcement of laws of marriage fell on a wide array of local and national
courts whose interpretations overlapped and sometimes conflicted. One
Copyright © 2008. Manchester University Press. All rights reserved.
result of this idiosyncratic regime was that both civil and criminal courts
were flexible about cohabiting unions. Judges upheld many cohab
itation
231 j
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Frost, Ginger S.. Living in Sin : Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth-Century England,
Manchester University Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nscc-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1069613.
Created from nscc-ebooks on 2019-06-18 23:44:10.
living in sin
contracts and legacies in wil s to partners or children. Like the couples
themselves, many judges and jurors regarded cohabitees as ‘practical y
married’, and juries were notoriously unwilling to convict poor people
who had married illegal y, no matter how blatant their behaviour. Yet these
mixtures also meant that the courts’ reaction to cohabitation could be
surprisingly harsh (as in violence cases) and inconsistent. Moreover, the
adjudication of family life did not all come from the top. The actions of
thousands of couples (as in bigamy cases) pressured judges to use their
discretion in favor of cohabitation and eventual y led to changes in the
law itself. By looking at hundreds of cases, rather than simply appeals, this
study shifts the perspective on domestic legal reform in the nineteenth
century to the role of ordinary people. A person’s sense of ‘being married’
often conflicted with the state’s definition, so many people took action well
in advance of legal changes.
A final contribution of this book concerns definitions and the marriage
debate. Victorians struggled to define both cohabitation and marriage; the
differences were crucial in legal forms, but often elusive in practice. At one
end of the spectrum were those who included only those unions with both
state approval and religious sacraments as ‘real’ marriages. At the other end
were those who insisted that ‘true’ marriages were relationships and ideas,
with no need of legal or spiritual sanction. Most Victorians fell somewhere
between these two extremes, but a surprising number supported some
kinds of reforms (as in affinal marriages or divorce reform) by the end
of the century. Thus, the definition differed between groups of people –
religions, classes, and neighbourhoods.
This variability helps explain the slowness of change and the anxiety
of many people in reforming marriage. Of course, many reasons existed
for this delay, including fears of ‘hurting’ marriage and the implacable