Dr Lee Edwards

Woman of the Day feminist and author Caroline Norton born OTD 1808 in London whose intense lobbying of Parliament and Queen Victoria was instrumental in the passing of three Acts of Parliament giving married women long overdue legal rights for the first time. They spelled the end of coverture, the common law principle that a married woman was no more than a chattel - the property - of her husband. Caroline married at 19. Her family, though well-connected, was penniless. It was a mistake. George Norton was happy to use his wife’s social connections to gain advancement but failed to earn money as a barrister. Hardly surprising. He was a nightmare: jealous, possessive, violent, abusive and a drunk. She left him when she 28 and managed to support herself and her children for awhile by writing books and poems. In those days, a woman’s earnings belonged to her husband. She was a mere chattel, remember. He confiscated her income, leaving her penniless once more. Caroline fought back. She ran up bills in his name and when creditors came to collect, she told them to pursue him. He retaliated by kidnapping their sons, hiding them with relatives in Scotland and later Yorkshire, refusing to tell Caroline where they were. Under English law then, children were the legal property of their father and there was little she could do to regain custody. Norton then accused her of an affair with the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, and demanded £10,000 from Melbourne (£1.2 million in today’s money) not to cause a scandal. The PM refused to pay and Norton took him to court. At the end of a nine-day trial, the jury threw out Norton’s claim, siding with Melbourne, but the publicity almost brought down the government. The scandal eventually died but not before ruining Caroline’s reputation. Norton continued to stop her from seeing her three sons and blocked her from receiving a divorce. One of the sons died as a result of an avoidable accident and he relented enough to let Caroline see her children but refused to give her custody. She had no recourse. She was his possession in law and so were her children. When Parliament debated divorce reform in 1855, Caroline submitted a detailed account of her own marriage to MPs and described the difficulties faced by women as the result of existing laws. “An English wife may not leave her husband's house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of "conjugal rights," but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge...and carry her away by force... “If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself...She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for "damages." If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband, a vinculo, however profligate he may be...Those dear children, the loss of whose pattering steps and sweet occasional voices made the silence of [my] new home intolerable as the anguish of death...what I suffered respecting those children, God knows ... under the evil law which suffered any man, for vengeance or for interest, to take baby children from the mother.” Largely through Caroline’s intense campaigning which included writing to Queen Victoria, Parliament passed the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870. Although Caroline herself did not benefit, the Acts gave married women for the first time ever a right to their children, a law allowing divorce, and by virtue of the Married Women's Property Act 1870, the right of married women to inherit property and take court action on their own behalf. The Act also granted married women in the UK for the first time a separate legal identity from their husbands. Caroline was finally free of Norton when he died in 1875. She remarried in 1877 but died just three months later at the age of 69. I hope she found some peace and contentment in those too brief few months.