ABSTRACT
The Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes which sat between 1909 and 1912 represents a pivotal point in our understanding of divorce, being the moment at which the shift from a judicial to an administrative procedure began.1 Both Hammerton and Bland stress the importance of the evidence of the W omen’s Co-operative Guild (WCG) to the divorce law commission. Its testimony of marital difficulties amongst £the better-off working class and lower middle class represented by the Guild . . . makes it impossible to speak of any steady decline in domestic violence by the Edwardian years’.2 Recent historical scholarship has addressed the tensions between class and gender surrounding the private marital problems of working-class women.3 Ayers and Lambertz argue that 4the quality of marital relationships is crucial to an assessment of the history of workingclass urban culture and gender relations’. Their study of interwar, workingclass Liverpool explores the link between economic roles within the family and the potential for domestic violence.4 Hammerton also sees domestic violence as rooted in £. . . disputes over routine measures of persecution, over finances and differing views of authority . . .’.5 Hammerton echos Ellen Ross in emphasising that for the most part 'marital discord mostly remained private and secluded from the public eye . . .’.6 Elizabeth Roberts argues that the majority of women in abusive marriages were £. . . compliant, dutiful, silent, uncomplaining’.7 Lucy Bland emphasises women’s increasing politicisation through the women’s movement and their attempts to challenge male sexuality, and as Joanne Jones’s and Catherine Euler’s chapters in this volume demonstrate, domestic violence was a concern of both feminist and conservative opinion. However, for the nineteenth century at least, the majority of working-class women in unhappy or abusive marriages were effectively denied an avenue to directly voice their discontent.8
