take my wife. please.
May 23, 2019 7:46 AM Subscribe
“Men have no right to sell their wives for a quart of beer or for anything else.” He sentenced Betsy to a week of hard labor.
The biggest misogyny here to my eye is that the women get punished for behavior of themselves and TWO other people. Sure, getting paraded to sale in a ribbon or livestock halter is awful. A week of hard labor possibly worse. Watching the men who benefitted from this just keep on going more than a bit disheartening. Does the judge order for the return of the woman to her first husband? I can’t say I want to dig into this myself.
And then this
Menefee also notes that many of the purchasers had “more remunerative, socially prestigious positions,” than the sellers, suggesting that upward social mobility may have played a part.
My money is not so much on women leaving one husband for the purpose of social climbing as it is on women wanting to not starve. Leaving a relationship for many women, even today, results in poverty. The use of the word many is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and I’d bet most women weren’t finding very wealthy men to move in with. And they aren’t giving any numbers about how much more remunerative these jobs were or what the jump in social prestige was by example. From grave digger to sheep shearer? From brewer to bar owner? No idea is given. And so the fuck what if women are striving for upward mobility anyway??? How judgmental can you be of women wanting a bit of comfort and security in a world openly hostile, where the rate of death for both mother and child in childbirth and the first year of an infants life is astonishing?
This reads as both ‘women these days with their easy no-fault divorces’ and also ‘here’s this weird thing greedy women did 200 years ago.’
posted by bilabial at 8:16 AM on May 23, 2019 [13 favorites]
I dimly remember a passage in one of the 20 or so Aubrey Maturin novels where Preserved Killick, Captain Aubrey's steward, buys a wife in a pub during one of their stretches on land. I knew the author did a lot of research for the books, so I'm not surprised this was a real thing.
posted by Bee'sWing at 8:55 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Bee'sWing at 8:55 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Seems like it sucks all around, for all involved. Little people with no recourse, forced into illegal shit because there is no other way.
posted by Meatbomb at 10:51 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Meatbomb at 10:51 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
And so the fuck what if women are striving for upward mobility anyway??? How judgmental can you be of women wanting a bit of comfort and security in a world openly hostile, where the rate of death for both mother and child in childbirth and the first year of an infants life is astonishing?
I didn't catch the judgmentalness, can you point me to it? Or is seeking upward social mobility intrinsically negative so identifying it is necessarily judgmental?
(This is an honest, not rhetorical, question, I just genuinely didn't notice what you're picking up on.)
posted by biogeo at 11:26 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
I didn't catch the judgmentalness, can you point me to it? Or is seeking upward social mobility intrinsically negative so identifying it is necessarily judgmental?
(This is an honest, not rhetorical, question, I just genuinely didn't notice what you're picking up on.)
posted by biogeo at 11:26 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
Upward social mobility as a goal of marriage is considered negative, in the broad social vernacular.
Additionally if you just look at a bell curve of who middle class women marry you’d see that ‘many’ of the men they chose earned ‘more’ than the women's fathers and/or had higher social status occupations. And the bell curve of who middle class women marry as a second husband is likely also a bell curve and I’d be very interested to see if it wasn’t. The author chose a bad way of describing what is probably actually a normal distribution of income differences. It could just as easily be said that ‘many of the women married men whose earned less or had significantly lower status positions than the first husbands, an indicator that women marrying a second time were less desirable than first wives.’
Always watch for words like ‘many’ when a person has actual data at hand. They could have easily given you a portion of their available numbers and chose not to.
It’s possible that there wasn’t I’ll intent behind the choice but I will argue all day that t was a choice.
posted by bilabial at 2:52 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Additionally if you just look at a bell curve of who middle class women marry you’d see that ‘many’ of the men they chose earned ‘more’ than the women's fathers and/or had higher social status occupations. And the bell curve of who middle class women marry as a second husband is likely also a bell curve and I’d be very interested to see if it wasn’t. The author chose a bad way of describing what is probably actually a normal distribution of income differences. It could just as easily be said that ‘many of the women married men whose earned less or had significantly lower status positions than the first husbands, an indicator that women marrying a second time were less desirable than first wives.’
Always watch for words like ‘many’ when a person has actual data at hand. They could have easily given you a portion of their available numbers and chose not to.
It’s possible that there wasn’t I’ll intent behind the choice but I will argue all day that t was a choice.
posted by bilabial at 2:52 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Always watch for words like ‘many’ when a person has actual data at hand.
Yes, I think this is a very good point in general. In this case I don't know exactly what to make of it, since the relevant sentence is a hybrid of a direct quote from a researcher and what appears to be paraphrasing.
My overall read of the piece is certainly different in tone. My takeaway was "look at this weird way people dealt with the constraints of a broken social system." On the one hand, you have the fact that the legal system generally treated women as the property of the men in their lives (husbands or fathers), so this concept of "wife selling" has a certain rationale within that system even if it wasn't actually legal. On the other hand, my understanding is that while the noble and bourgeois classes had long had rigidly defined gender roles, prior to industrialization things had actually been somewhat more equitable within the poorer classes. (Perhaps it would be more correct to say "less inequitable.") Certainly by the Victorian period, bourgeois sensibilities about the "ideal women" as a wife and mother in the home were being explicitly codified as social norms. The modern Anglophone world's concept of "traditional gender roles" was invented during the 19th century, placing new constraints on women of all social classes and making them if anything even more subservient to men. So during the time period this practice is described, the roles available to women in society are changing, and mostly not for the better. Combine this with the lack of access to divorce (the hypocrisy of the Church of England, of all organizations, about divorce at this time is still remarkable) and women are clearly left with few options for escaping a bad or abusive husband.
My takeaway from the article was not that the author is criticizing historical or modern women, but that she's describing how, given few other good options, some women were able to take advantage of the practice of "wife selling" to exert a certain amount of self-determination in an unexpected way. Now, I think this needs to be taken with a heap of salt, but to her credit I think she's pretty up-front about the big caveat:
At any rate, now that I've learned about it I'll admire the women who did manage to use this system to their advantage. Human resourcefulness in finding some small amount of autonomy even within oppressive systems is always impressive.
posted by biogeo at 4:00 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
Yes, I think this is a very good point in general. In this case I don't know exactly what to make of it, since the relevant sentence is a hybrid of a direct quote from a researcher and what appears to be paraphrasing.
My overall read of the piece is certainly different in tone. My takeaway was "look at this weird way people dealt with the constraints of a broken social system." On the one hand, you have the fact that the legal system generally treated women as the property of the men in their lives (husbands or fathers), so this concept of "wife selling" has a certain rationale within that system even if it wasn't actually legal. On the other hand, my understanding is that while the noble and bourgeois classes had long had rigidly defined gender roles, prior to industrialization things had actually been somewhat more equitable within the poorer classes. (Perhaps it would be more correct to say "less inequitable.") Certainly by the Victorian period, bourgeois sensibilities about the "ideal women" as a wife and mother in the home were being explicitly codified as social norms. The modern Anglophone world's concept of "traditional gender roles" was invented during the 19th century, placing new constraints on women of all social classes and making them if anything even more subservient to men. So during the time period this practice is described, the roles available to women in society are changing, and mostly not for the better. Combine this with the lack of access to divorce (the hypocrisy of the Church of England, of all organizations, about divorce at this time is still remarkable) and women are clearly left with few options for escaping a bad or abusive husband.
My takeaway from the article was not that the author is criticizing historical or modern women, but that she's describing how, given few other good options, some women were able to take advantage of the practice of "wife selling" to exert a certain amount of self-determination in an unexpected way. Now, I think this needs to be taken with a heap of salt, but to her credit I think she's pretty up-front about the big caveat:
Though many accounts seem to indicate that wife-selling usually worked out fairly well for the women, wives’ voices are rarely heard in the historical accounts, which end around 1905. Most of the narratives are told from men’s perspectives.So yeah, maybe it's true that "many" women found a way to improve their lives by escaping a bad husband with wife-selling, but I agree with you that it also seems possible that "many" women were shuffled from one abusive situation to another, and perhaps their stories were not recorded.
At any rate, now that I've learned about it I'll admire the women who did manage to use this system to their advantage. Human resourcefulness in finding some small amount of autonomy even within oppressive systems is always impressive.
posted by biogeo at 4:00 PM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]
It's the opening scene of the mayor of casterbridge
posted by Morpeth at 4:16 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Morpeth at 4:16 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]
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