“The Magistrates are Men”: Working-Class Marital Conflict and Appeals from the Magistrates’ Court to the Divorce Court after 1895

Abstract

Violent conflicts between husbands and wives present a difficult challenge to those charged with maintaining public order. In domestic matters, defining a boundary between properly accorded privacy and discord which poses a threat sufficient to justify official intervention raises complex issues of both principle and practice. Authorities charged with the responsibility of monitoring this boundary – the police and the courts – must evaluate conflicting stories about the particulars of emotionally-charged situations. They necessarily draw upon widelyshared assumptions about gender and class in order to make judgments. The decisions rendered by judicial institutions in turn enforce and reinforce those assumptions, as well as reveal them to our scrutiny. This essay draws upon new evidence about Magistrates’ Court proceedings under the 1895 Judicial Proceedings (Married Women) Act and uses documents that preserve rare transcript testimony as the basis for a more nuanced account of experiences of domestic violence that claimed the attention of legal authorities.

Ada Nield Chew, “Assault and Battery” reprinted in The Life and Writings of Ada Nield Chew, ed. Doris Nield Chew (London: Virago Press, 1982), 183.