Caroline Norton

“ Women alone, of the more helpless classes,—the classes set apart as not having free control of their own destinies,—should be denied the protection which in other cases supplies and balances such absence of free control? Are we to believe that the gentlemen of Great Britain are so jealous of their privilege of irresponsible power in this one respect, that they would rather know redress impossible in cases which they themselves admit to be instances of the grossest cruelty and baseness, than frame laws of control* for themselves, such as they are willing to frame for others? ”

“ Protect your own women. Look at home for instances of tyranny, persecution, and unavailing appeals for justice. Do not trouble yourselves yet, about the denial of social rights to slaves, or those laws of Kentucky which seem in such harmony with your own; do not even pretend to shudder at the disgraceful chastisement inflicted on Austrian women, for what in their land is treason. Come to us when your magistrates do not make a profit of the law they administer; when your aristocracy are not guilty of violence and brutality to their wives, which they excuse by libels in your gazettes ”

“ Not because I was ashamed of having accepted his bequest; if I had thought there was shame in it, I should not have taken it:—but because I then saw all the cruel baseness of Mr Norton's intention. All flashed upon me at once. I felt that I no longer stood in that Court to struggle for an income—but to struggle against infamy. I knew by sudden instinct, that the husband who had so often, to me and to others, asserted that the trial was the work of "Advisers" was now about to pretend he believed the charge brought against Lord Melbourne in 1836. ”

“ Why am I hunted and haunted through life, with a scandal involving two persons, but seemingly admitting of but one acquittal? If the story had been true, and palliation were possible for sin, the palliation might rather seem to be on the side of the weaker party. But it was not true. He said It was false. I say it was false. I cannot come down and read, amid cheers and acclamation, his letters for me: but what then? Am I to believe that I am too insignificant—that any one in England is too insignificant, for justice? Is it only for princes and politicians that defence can avail? ”

“ I turn from the subject of divorce, to the subject of divorceless separation; full of the same difficulty of obtaining justice.
The Legislature, which very properly discourages and discountenances separation between man and wife, acknowledges no legal change in the position of an undivorced woman. To stand the brunt of a vile and indecent action at law, and afterwards reside apart from her husband for ten, fifteen, twenty years,—with every human circumstance, except death, that can put division between them,—does not affect the legal fiction which assumes that a married couple are one. ”

“ What an impulse to humanity is an adverse creed! How easy to see that oppression in others which we deny to exist among ourselves! Here are the gentlemen of England, mustering three hundred strong, in the senate of their country; and nearly two-thirds of that number vote with enthusiastic acclamation for inquiry—into what? Into the treatment of women not of their own religion, many not even their own country-women—while those very men scout the notion of altering the laws, or of even making serious inquiry into the laws, affecting the interests of their own wives, sisters, and daughters! ”

“ Not being persons of wealth and station, we have a trial for bigamy, and this illegal attempt at happiness rooted up by the stern hand of justice, which pronounces such unions to be tares among the permitted grain, of marriages "dissolved by Act of Parliament." Such an anomaly in the administration of equal laws, is scarcely credible; but it exists; and is murmured against—by the obscure.
This difficulty,—which exists for the poor, on account of the expense of our form of divorce, exists also for women, from the reluctance to allow a divorce on their petition. ”

“ Masculine superiority is incontestable; and with the superiority should come protection. To refuse it because some women exist, who talk of "women's rights," of "women's equality," is to say that John Mitchell's exaggerated orations for Ireland, or the Chartist and Rebecca riots in Wales, or Swing fires in the rural districts in England, would have been a sound and sufficient reason for refusing justice to all the Queen's other subjects in the United Kingdom. The rebellion of a group, against legitimate authority, is not to deprive the general subject-party of general protection. ”

“ There are also those in whose eyes the accusation of a woman is her condemnation, and who care little whether the story be false or true, so long as there is or was a story against her. But juster minds, who will pause and review the circumstances Mr Norton himself has published, will perhaps think the fate of that woman a hard one,—whom neither the verdict of a jury, nor the solemn denial of a voice from the dead, nor the petition of her husband for a reconciliation and oblivion of the past, can clear from a charge always and utterly untrue. ”

“ Such protection, in degree, as is accorded to servants, to apprentices, to the sailor on the high seas, to all whom the law admits to be in a subordinate and helpless position. Such protection, in degree, as has lately been extended to women in the lower classes, by the more stringent laws enacted in their behalf.
In arguing my case from my own example, I am not ignorant that there are persons who think such argument blameable on other grounds; who deem a husband's right so indefeasible, and his title so sacred, that even a wronged wife should keep silence. ”

“ I invite Mr Norton to disprove it. He cannot. If he had merely been unfaithful, I would have forgiven it. If he had merely defrauded me, I would have confined myself to the formal struggle against that fraud; but he has publicly libelled me; and against that public libel, repeated after an interval of sixteen years, I will make my final stand. It is not in human nature to bear, without the deepest resentment, the last attack made upon me. I do feel the deepest resentment ”

“ The argument that the husband may be bound by sureties, is useless. Suppose what Mr Norton affirmed, were true, and that the woman could not get a surety? Suppose a case different from mine, who am struggling against a great wrong, with good friends, and clear intelligence; Suppose her, friendless, helpless, foolish, ignorant, and obscure; is she, therefore, to be cheated, by the visionary supposition that she is one with the husband, whose only assertion of a husband's right is to defraud and oppress her? ”

“ Why do you grant to the husband a divorce for the adultery of the wife? Because he ought not to forgive her; and separation is inevitable. Where the wife cannot forgive,—and separation is inevitable by reason of the crime of the husband,—the wife is entitled to the like remedy. In this instance, reconciliation is impossible—the wife cannot forgive the husband and return to his house, without herself being guilty of incest. ”

“ Why, then, are my children kept from me?—from me whom even their own witnesses proved to be a careful and devoted mothers' Mr Norton says, the Law gives him my children. I know it does, but the Law does no more; it does not compel me to endure more than separation from them; and sooner than allow them to connect my visits in their memory with secresy and shame, I would submit never again to behold them till they were of an age to visit me without asking permission of any human being."
More than once, Mr Norton's advisers have shown more feeling for me than my husband himself ”

“ That which was law to the generation of yesterday, is not law to us; and that which is law to us, may be reversed for the generation of tomorrow; why should unjust laws for women be more permanent than other unjust laws? We know that Law was mapped and planned among civilised nations as the great Highway to Justice. Where the road leads astray, it should be mended or altered: and it is one of the boasts of our ever-boastful England,, that she does this. ”

“ They dispute the date of Henry's unhallowed union; and this fact only appears clear, that he married Anne Boleyn before the sentence of divorce from Katharine was actually pronounced by Cranmer. Retribution was in store. Soon, too soon, that fair Aurora of the Reformation,—that woman with such generous impulses, such strong ambition, such passionate attachments, such universal fascination,—was to perish as a victim, where she had reigned as sovereign. Vain were her appeals to the tyrant-heart, whose flame of lust being burned out, held no other light to read a woman's prayer by. ”

“ Defence is possible to me—not silence. And I must remind those who think the right of a husband so indefeasible, that a wife ought rather to submit to the martyrdom of her reputation, than be justified at his expense, that I have refrained. All I state now, I might have stated at any time during the past unhappy years; and I never did publicly state it till now—now, when I find Mr Norton slandering the mother of his sons, by coarse anecdotes signed with his name and published by his authority ”

“ When he had obtained and employed the money he was desirous to raise, like Mr Patton of Virginia he resolved to "rescind the contract." When I, like the slave Norris, endeavoured to struggle against this gross breach of faith,—I was informed that by the law of England, "a married woman could not make a contract, or have monies of her own." When I complained of it,—I was punished by a flood of libellous accusations, published in all the English newspapers; libels for which, though proved falsehoods, I could obtain no redress, because they were published by my husband. ”

“ Many a woman may live to thank Heaven that I had courage and energy left, to attempt the task: and, since no one can foretel the future, even men may pause ere they fling down my pamphlet with masculine scorn; for a day may come,—however improbable—to some one of my readers, when he would give his right hand, for the sake of sister, daughter, or friend, that the law were in such a condition as to afford a chance of justice; without the pain of a protracted struggle, or the disgrace of a public brawl. ”

“ I claim Justice. If even my defence offend,—blame the Law. If the Law of Divorce were differently constituted, the scandal never could have taken place, of a trial against the Premier of England, which that minister affirmed he believed to be brought for a pecuniary advantage, and to be supported by suborned witnesses. If the laws of protection for women were differently constituted, the struggle about a broken contract could not have taken place. ”

“ The principle of the law is, that the woman's separate existence is not acknowledged; it is merged in the husband's existence; hence the difficulty in the matter of the contract. The husband cannot legally contract with his wife: she is a part of himself. It is boasted, on the other hand, as an immense concession to the wife, that, in consequence of this merging of her existence,—this nonentity in law,—she cannot be arrested or sued for debt. She does not exist: her husband exists; and if the debt be recoverable, it must be from him. ”

“ If not, let them waive judgment in my case; for if choice were allowed me, I would rather be murdered and remembered by friends and children with love and regret, than have the slanders believed which my husband has invented of me. It is he, who has made silence impossible. With HIM rests the breaking of those seals which keep the history of each man's home sacred from indifferent eyes. ”

“ Is it, or is it not, a grating thought, that in a country so eager for justice, the last to benefit by that eagerness, are its own women? Is it, or is it not, a grating thought, that differences of religious opinion should give such interest to individual cases of hardship, that the letters of two young ladies, put into a Roman Catholic convent for education, by a Roman Catholic father, should be read to three hundred members of Parliament as a means of convincing, and arousing their minds to the consideration of one species of wrong ”

“ They have a right—founded on nature, equity, and religion—to the protection of man. Power is on the side of men—power of body, power of mind, power of position. With that power should come, not only the fact, but the instinct of protection. Even the poor dumb animal will defend its companion and its young. Even the tiny bird, that pants to death in a child's hand, will resist, to the extent of its fragile force, an attack upon its nestlings and its mate. ”

“ Two of the ablest men the English bar could boast—Lord Abinger and Sir Fitzroy Kelly—might surely steer him past that dreadful shoal, with this one skilful stroke of the oar! So Hope whispered; and so the event proved. Lord Abinger "refused" the evidence which Lord Wynford had warned Lord Grantley would be fatal. Lord Abinger "rejected the advocate," whose dangerous testimony was to turn the scales. Let the foreigners, whose methods of jurisprudence we criticise, read what can happen in an English Court of Justice—and be boasted of afterwards by an English Magistrate! ”