ABSTRACT
The campaign to reform the laws of marriage was a middle-class movement for the very good reason that middle-class wives had much more to reform. It was like the Battle of Jericho: it needed a determined army and a very loud trumpet to bring the walls of male privilege tumbling down. Middle-class women in Victorian England felt more trapped in the gilded cage of marriage than the majority of women in other social classes. A great lady or a factory woman are independent persons – personages – the women of the middle classes are nobodies, and if they act for themselves they lose caste! Nonetheless, married women’s lack of control over their own earnings, unless their husbands allowed it, had by the mid-nineteenth century become a sufficiently burning issue that in March 1856 a Petition was submitted to the British Parliament asking them to amend the Common Law.
