Robin C. Sager. Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America

According to the old saw, there are two sides to every divorce. But Robin C. Sager’s well-researched new study of more than fifteen hundred antebellum divorce cases reveals a lot more disagreement than simply that between husband and wife. By plumbing the original-jurisdiction divorce records of 1840–1860 from the states of Virginia, Texas, and Wisconsin, Sager uncovers a significant lack of consensus within and between communities over what constituted marital cruelty, and what treatment spouses could be expected to tolerate from each other. Sager places her study in several rich historiographical frameworks. Her research tests familiar arguments about American violence by taking a comparative approach, contrasting marital cruelty allegations in the long-settled southern state of Virginia with cruelty allegations in the southern frontier state of Texas and in the northern frontier state of Wisconsin. Her most surprising finding is that Wisconsin marriages were more violent than marriages in either Virginia or Texas, which runs counter to widely accepted claims about the exceptionally high rates of southern violence. Sager also challenges narratives of the rise of companionate marriage, by looking at how spouses articulated the nature of their injuries from cruel treatment. She finds that abused spouses more frequently complained of how cruelty led to the abrogation of marital duties than of the ways that cruelty betrayed marital love. These complaints, rather than looking forward to definitions of marriage as an affective union, harkened back to colonial understandings of marriage as a covenant of mutual obligations. Lastly, Sager situates her research in the long scholarly conversation about the rise of humanitarianism. Here her argument confirms conventional scholarship, by arguing that divorce cases showed a growing sensibility to the problem of pain in the antebellum era.

Criminology · Cruelty · Domestic violence · Frontier · Poison control · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Suicide prevention · Wife · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies