At the limits of liberty: married women and confinement in eighteenth-century England

Foyster, Elizabeth

doi:10.1017/s0268416002004058

Cited by 22 publications

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“…Madness in eighteenth-century England is less well understood than in the nineteenth century, for which legislation and bureaucratic records are more plentiful (Foyster, 2002; Houston, 2014; Macdonald, 1989). The incidence of madness in the population has been estimated using reports at quarter sessions from a sample of Poor Law records (Suzuki, 1991).…”

Section: Madness In the Eighteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London

McCarthy

2024

Hist Psychiatry

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An ‘inquisition’ (or inquiry) held before a Justice of the Peace was the primary instrument for management of lunacy in eighteenth-century England. Yet its purpose was to protect wealth rather than the individual. The 1766 case book of Dr John Monro, London’s leading doctor for madness, unexpectedly records a consultation that links two siblings who both had inquisitions. Nicholas Jeffreys’ only son was attested lunatic in 1744: to circumvent inheritance through primogeniture, Jeffreys directed the family wealth to his last living child. One of his three daughters married Lord Camden, a former Lord Chancellor: after her and her second sister’s deaths, the last-surviving sister was also placed under inquisition in 1780, to ensure the inheritance for his own family.

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Section: Madness In the Eighteenth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London

McCarthy

2024

Hist Psychiatry

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“…The forced detention of married women in their houses, or later in the eighteenth century in private madhouses, has been discussed by Foyster. 60 In 1674 Justice Hale had ruled that, while a husband did not have a legal right to beat his wife, he could chastise her by 'confinement to the house in case of her extravagance'. 61 William may have heard of this judgment as he later used the contrived excuse of Mary's contracted debts to justify his detention of her.…”

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Meanwhile, her brother Caesar had made an application to the Lord Chief Justice for a warrant against William for his ill treatment of Mary -possibly a writ of habeas corpus, which was one of the few options available to women to regain their freedom and deny husbands power over their bodies in cases of domestic violence. 62 William now showed Mary a letter that he claimed came from the Lord Chief Justice, giving him an absolute right to 'keep his wife in confinement as long as he pleased for her amendment'. Convinced that she had no way out, Mary agreed to sign whatever William asked and papers were drawn up by another of William's relations, Bromsgrove attorney Thomas Vernon.…”

Section: Mary's Third Marriage -William Chancementioning

confidence: 99%

Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

Powers¹

2019

JGFH

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This paper discusses an early eighteenth-century Chancery case involving the extreme physical and mental abuse of a wife by a husband intent on stripping her of all her property, and looks at this in the context of the contemporary legal and social framework and the options for redress available to such a woman. In the process it explores the genealogy of the Catholic Arden family who were located near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. In the absence of many Catholic records, especially for baptisms and marriages, it explores the use of wills, recusancy records, Chancery records, and correspondence to fill in the gaps and create a family history. Introduction On 10 January 1719/20, a Chancery suit was taken out on behalf of Mary Chance by her brother Caesar Johnson in an attempt to recover the deeds to her real estate, the inheritance due to her daughters from their father, and her money, jewellery, clothes and other possessions. She also petitioned for the control of her three children by her former husband, James Arden, who were being held by her abusive third husband, William Chance. 1 The widowed Mary had been flattered into a precipitate third marriage, and was held captive, physically and mentally abused, while William Chance worked to deprive her of everything she owned. Eventually she escaped, wearing only her shift, nightgown and slippers, hid all day in a hayloft and finally sought refuge in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire. As with many Chancery cases, only the initial complaint and witness statements exist, but it is possible to make some deductions about the eventual outcome using these and other documentary evidence such as wills and two other Chancery cases. All this enables us to reconstruct the family networks that Mary married into, and to shed light on the legal and social position of an early eighteenth-century wife. Availability of Catholic records in the early eighteenth century Following the defeat and flight of Catholic King James II in 1690, there was a steady decline in the numbers of Roman Catholics, estimated by the mid-eighteenth century at about 70,000 or 1 per cent of the population. 2 There were concentrations of Catholic families in certain counties, which included Worcestershire. Some who were Catholic in secret were prepared to be baptised or married by an Anglican priest in order to avoid legal penalties. Prevented from holding office and otherwise legally disadvantaged, many converted to Protestantism. Some had the eldest son baptised in the Church of England to ensure the family inheritance, and others obtained certification from the local bishop that they had taken communion according to Anglican rites to avoid a charge of recusancy. Before about 1700 Catholic registers of births and marriages were not kept for fear of endangering any priest who did so. After this date Catholic registers increasingly came into existence, usually recorded in Latin. Burials of Catholics, which had to take place in consecrated-and hence Church of England-ground may therefore appear in Anglican registers....

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“…Yet if relatively little geographical work has engaged with the pre-modern and early modern period, there is agenda-setting research by historians and archaeologists, including rich and suggestive material on the gendering of space in medieval and early modern contexts (for useful overviews, see Beebe, Davis and Gleadle, 2012;Williamson, 2012). This has included work on space and gender in religious buildings (Gilhrist, 1994;Dolan, 2002;Flather, 2015), household space (Vickery, 2009;Smith, 2010;Gilchrist, 2012;Whyte, 2015), the street (Griffiths, 1998;Shoemaker, 2001;Gowing, 2000), sites of polite sociability such as spas and coffee houses (Cowan, 2001;Herbert, 2009) and the law courts (Gowing, 2003), as well as work on historical experiences of domestic violence (Foyster, 2005;Bailey, 2009) and forcible confinement to private asylums (Foyster, 2002). Much of this work has focused on urban and indoor spaces with rather less written about gender and rural space or landscape (although see Muller, 2005;Flather, 2007;Fisher, 2010 interrogate and challenge idealized and binary readings of space as variously public or private, male or female, civic or domestic -and the hierarchical assumptions implicit within such categorisations -and their change over time.…”

Section: Situating Women and Gendermentioning

confidence: 99%

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

McDonagh

2018

Gender, Place & Culture

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Reflecting on her own experience of being a graduate student in the early 1990s, Boyer (2004,(169)(170) suggests that 'if uncertainty existed over what it meant to be a feminist geographer, what it meant to be a feminist historical geographer was even less clear' (my emphasis). That was more than 25 years ago at around the time Gender, Place and Culture was first published (on which see Domosh and Ruwanpura, 2018) but much the same is arguably true today, even whilst women, gender and feminist approaches to the past are now well evidenced within the sub-discipline of historical geography. As Domosh and Morin (2003, 257) noted in their review in GPC, feminist historical geography 'rarely travels under its own name' and the term remains little used outside North America. As an UK-based scholar who consciously identifies as writing feminist historical geographies (McDonagh, 2017, 2), I am perhaps particularly aware of the challenges and opportunities presented by such ambiguities and uncertainties. In what follows, I explore some of the possibilities and prospects for feminist historical geographies and geographers.Here I define feminist historical geography as scholarship which asks geographical questions of historical material and is informed by feminist theories, approaches and methodologies. Its empirical subject matter is necessarily expansive and diverse, but often has a particular focus on the lives of women and other marginalized groups, and on the ways gender and space were -and are -co-constituted. This essay interrogates recent developments within this broad terrain, specifically articles and books published since 2000 and either appearing in geography journals or written by those self-identifying as geographers. The main exception is work by historians and archaeologists interested in gender, space and place, which is cited here in an attempt to open up new research directions for feminist historical geographers. The material discussed here was primarily written by Anglophone geographers, whilst recognising and acknowledging that the Anglo-American hegemony in feminist geography -and feminism more generally -is problematic (on this, see Garcia Ramon et al., 2006)]. In what follows, we shuttle across spaces and between scales, roaming from the sites of empire to the intimate geographies of the home,

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At the limits of liberty: married women and confinement in eighteenth-century England

Abstract: Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0268416002004058How to cite this article: ELIZABETH FOYSTER (2002). At the limits of liberty: married women and connement in eighteenth-century England.

Cited by 22 publications

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De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London

De lunatico inquirendo: managing family inheritance across madness in eighteenth-century London

Chance v. Chance. Researching an abused wife in the early eighteenth century

Feminist historical geographies: doing and being

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