Judicial rhetoric and gender reality: Cuckolded husbands and abandoned wives in Gilded Age America

When married women's property laws uncloaked the legal identity of wives in the mid-nineteenth century, married women gained rights to own property, control their wages, and defend their rights in court. Previously, only a husband could sue a third party who interfered with the marital relationship, usually a paramour or a family member. These lawsuits incorporated a variety of gendered assumptions; the advent of wives bringing these lawsuits against their husbands' lovers and relatives forced the judiciary to accommodate new concepts of equality with traditional gender roles.;This dissertation is based on appellate marital interference cases from 1870--1900 and legal commentaries. The interaction of the language used by those judges with the prevailing standards for manliness and womanhood---deduced from literature, correspondence, and studies---reflected the attitudinal change toward women that occurred in the late-nineteenth century, as well as the manner in which law and societal norms interrelate.;Drawing on cases from all regions of the country, this dissertation concludes that a clear judicial trend developed in the late nineteenth century United States. Courts welcomed the independent legal status of married women as cultural progress. Judges held that each spouse had an equal marital right to emotional support and affection, reflecting the increased importance of companionate marriage and the decline of patriarchy. Judges also equated the importance of the domestic contributions of wives with the financial contributions of husbands, thereby reinforcing traditional gendered marital roles. The focus was on preserving the family as the basis of a stable and prosperous society. But gendered assumptions of sexuality illustrated the limits of the rhetoric of equality, as judges were constricted by the stereotypical sexual behavior of men and women, and the double standard applied by society to the consequences of extra-marital relationships. Even though appellate judges did not view themselves as advocates for a change in women's roles, the rhetoric in martial interference cases provided an important bridge from early nineteenth-century legal invisibility of wives to the twentieth-century New Woman at the ballot box, even as it saddled women with the burden of uncompensated domestic labor.