Victorian Wives and property

In 1869 Susannah palmer appeared in the recorder’s court in London, charged with stabbing her husband. He had treated her so brutally for many years that at last she left him in order to support herself and her children and establish a new home. Then her husband appeared and seized and sold all her possessions—as he had every legal right to do. ¹ A few years later Millicent Garrett Fawcett had her purse snatched by a young thief in London. When she appeared in court to testify against him, she heard the youth charged with “stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £1 18s. 6d., the property of Henry Fawcett,” and she recalled, “I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.” ² Such were two women’s experiences of the common law relating to married women’s property. One was a poor working woman who would have gone unnoticed in her time but for her tragic story. The other, happily married to a distinguished Cambridge professor and Liberal member of Parliament, was for years the outstanding leader of the women’s suffrage cause in England.