Engender blog
GUEST POST: Divorce and Women’s Rights in Scottish History
Dr Rebecca Mason is a historian whose work focuses on Scottish legal and social history, and women’s legal rights. She is currently writing a book on ordinary women’s navigation of legal systems and property relationships in early modern Scotland. In this blog, Dr Mason explores the complex history of divorce law in Scotland in the context of married women’s rights.
For centuries, nothing determined a Scottish woman’s identity more than her marital status. For a woman living in Scotland during the sixteenth century, her legal rights were inextricably connected to her relationship to a man: as a daughter to a father, a wife to a husband, or a widow to a former husband. Whether a woman was single, married, or widowed greatly defined her legal, social and economic opportunities during a time when men’s laws ruled women’s lives.
Prior to key legislative changes in the nineteenth century, Scottish legal rules concerning married women’s rights restricted a wife’s ability to own property, control real estate, enter into agreements, or initiate litigation without her husband’s consent. In other words, a Scottish wife - whether she was living in the thirteenth century or the seventeenth century - could not ever act in law as an independent person. But what of those married women who broke these legal restrictions and fought lawsuits against their own husbands?
While the legalities of marriage and divorce continue to evolve today, it is fascinating to uncover how women in heterosexual relationships managed the breakdown of their marriages in Scotland hundreds of years ago, including how separating and divorcing women sought to protect their rights during a time when they were afforded few.
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