Wife selling in England… but it wasn’t really how it seemed

Описание: The practice of wife selling in England is believed to begin in the late 17th as a socially accepted alternative divorce among the lower class, when legal divorce was expensive and restricted, accessible only through an Act of Parliament. It usually took the form of an auction, often at a local market. Generally, wife sales occurred with the consent of both the husband and wife, with a pre-arranged purchaser (new husband), who was often the wife's lover if there had been an affair, and the sales were symbolic. The public arena created witnesses to the transaction to let the community know that one marriage had ended and another begun. Sometimes there wasn’t a designated buyer, and actual bidding broke out. Men could announce a wife sale without informing their wife, and she might be bid on by total strangers. But women had to agree to the sale. There were exceptions where women were sold without their knowledge or against their will, but those were less common.

It would seem that the woman was at a disadvantage during a wife sale, but that wasn’t always the case. Since she was still married to her first husband under the law, he was technically entitled to all of her possessions (at the time, married women’s property all belonged to their husbands). The public nature of the sale, though, made it clear to one and all that the seller gave up his right to his former wife’s possessions. And the woman also sidestepped the very real threat of having her new lover sued by her first husband for “criminal conversation.”

Wife selling declined after the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce more accessible and social attitudes shifted.

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