Women before the court by Lindsay R. Moore

Author:Lindsay R. Moore [Moore, Lindsay R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Legal History, Gender & the Law, History, Women, Social Science, Women's Studies
ISBN: 9781526136350
Google: iXS5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-05-10T22:34:03+00:00

After her second petition, the Salem magistrates allowed Beatrice to live separately from her husband. She died in 1683 with an inventory of goods worth £181.17

While obtaining a full divorce was rarely an option in colonial Maryland, wives did seek to live separately from their husbands and to secure financial maintenance from them. In one such case Elizabeth Tennyson, wife of John Tennyson, petitioned the Council of Maryland on 25 October 1680. Elizabeth appeared in person before the members of the council, explaining that she could not live with her husband and asking that he give her maintenance so she could live separately. In making her statement before the council, Elizabeth said that she ‘could not live peaceably and quietly with him, but with a great deal of danger and hazard to her person’, and asked the council to allow her ‘competence maintenance’. The council summoned John Tennyson to appear and answer Elizabeth's complaints. Though he denied Elizabeth's allegations of severe abuse, he did admit that he could ‘never entertain that love and respect of his said wife or neither afford her that countenance in his house as is property due from a man to his wife’. The justices therefore ordered that separate maintenance be awarded to Elizabeth to live apart from her husband. The household goods included Elizabeth's ‘owne bed’ with its furniture, all of her clothes and a yearly maintenance of three barrels of corn, 300 lb of meat and 1,000 lb of tobacco for the remainder of her life.18

Unlike Massachusetts, which had tight-knit communities that acted as a surveillance system for misbehaviour, the population of colonial Maryland was spread over a wide area, making it easy for a husband to disappear without any common knowledge of his whereabouts. Sarah Harris petitioned the Council of Maryland in 1683, complaining that her husband had abandoned her and her five children ‘for the most part of the yeare except the dead of the winter’. She alleged that her husband contributed nothing to the maintenance of the household, so that she feared that she and her children would starve or fall on the poor rates unless some action was taken. When the weather turned colder, her husband stayed in the household and ‘hath eaten up all … the childrens maintenance, which she all the yeare provides for the keeping of them’. The authorities who heard Sarah's petition referred it to be decided by the Lord Proprietary and the General Assembly, which was advised to provide relief for the defendant with ‘all convenient speed’.19

The willingness of magistrates to support wives’ petitions for separation and maintenance is a remarkable example of the law's power within the patriarchal family. When relationships between husbands and wives collapsed, the law provided the only assurance of equity and justice that women could expect to receive.

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