‘I was utterly at my husband’s mercy’: voices from the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1910–1914

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uses the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s evidence to the 1912 Royal Commission on divorce to explore working-class women’s views about, and experiences of, marriage and divorce in the early twentieth century. Unlike any other evidence presented to the Commission the Guild’s was directly based on testimony from working-class women. These had been collected in letters from members to the Guild’s General Secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, who testified on its behalf to the Commission. The bulk of the letters were from wives and mothers who generally came from better off sections of the working class. They confirm Guild members’ overwhelming support for some degree of reform to current laws, along with more limited backing for Davies’ radical proposals for divorce on grounds of mutual consent. The article demonstrates that these letters provide vivid detailed testimony of the impact of domestic abuse, of wives’ financial dependence on their husbands, and of the gender inequality enshrined in contemporary divorce laws. It argues that support for reform was often combined with a Christian conviction that marriage should be a ‘sacred bond’, and highlights a common vision of marriage as a relationship of equals.