SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

social order, educate dependents, and produce wealth.” 27 Divorce provisions were therefore a
tool to be used when poorly kept women or children were going to become wards of the state or
if a household seemed to be undermining political authority.
By the Revolutionary period, new political thought began to affect some of the thinking
on divorce. One of the most notable thinkers in this regard was Thomas Jefferson. As Glenda
Riley notes, “Virginia attorney and patriot Thomas Jefferson, for example, coupled ideas
regarding independence and happiness to divorce some years before he presented a similar
argument for terminating America’s relationship with England in the Declaration of
Independence.” 28 Jefferson’s notes from the early 1770s regarding a requested divorce by a
couple after nineteen turbulent months of marriage showed that he attempted to link
revolutionary ideas and divorce in order to persuade the Virginia legislature to dissolve the
marriage. Even though Jefferson never presented his case to the legislature due to the husband’s
death, the divorce petition he prepared in the early 1770s employed the same principles that he
would later use to justify the revolution. 29
Because Virginia law only allowed the legislature to grant separate maintenance decrees,
Jefferson prepared a legal brief to convince the legislators to expand the policy to grant an
absolute divorce. According to Riley, Jefferson’s argument combined the following: the
“Puritan argument that marriage and divorce were civil matters, Lockean arguments against
indissolvable contracts, and emerging American attitudes regarding women. He applied such
terms as liberty, natural right, equality, and dissolvable contract not to the plight of the American
colonies, but to an individual citizen caught in a distressing marriage.” 30 Jefferson’s stance on
27 Ibid., 15.
28 Riley, 53.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 54.
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