SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

family was poor, a legislative divorce was not a real option and the more common practice
would be for one spouse, typically the husband, simply to leave. Poor women, therefore, faced
almost certain destitution and, without a divorce, their ability to act on their own behalf was
severely constrained. When states began to shift from legislative to judicial divorces, the court
system saw an increase in the number of divorces primarily because it was easier for women to
use the divorce process.
The gradual easing of divorce restrictions ignited considerable debate. By mid-century,
the developing women’s rights movement triggered much of the controversy. Women who had
been involved in the abolition movement began to compare the situation of a marriage under
coverture to chattel slavery. While some portrayed marriage as an institution of society in which
the status of the parties was created and controlled by the law, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other
radical women’s rights advocates wanted to eliminate public involvement in marriage and
divorce. Stanton insisted that marriage was strictly a contractual obligation between men and
women. As VanBurkleo elaborates, “By constituting women and men as parties to contracts,
radicals weakened men’s claims to exclusive control of both the marital estate and dependents’
labor; neither women nor their labor could be said to belong to ‘masters’ if couples could strike
up binding agreements as equals.” 41 Furthermore, these radical women advocated for equal
contract rights—essentially the end of coverture—to negate women’s status as chattel.
The implications for divorce law were huge. To consider marriage as only a contract
between two individuals went far beyond the liberalization of domestic relations and divorce law
than most legislators and jurists were willing to accept. On the one hand, as VanBurkleo
suggests, “Liberalized domestic relations and divorce law—like the streamlining of law codes in
41 VanBurkleo, 68.
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