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Books > Law > English law > Private, property, family > Gender law
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Broken Engagements - The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800-1940 (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R3,711
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Broken Engagements - The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800-1940 (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Studies in Modern Legal History
Expected to ship within 12 - 19 working days
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The common law action for breach of promise of marriage originated
in the mid-seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth
century that it rose to prominence and became a regular feature in
law courts and gossip columns. By 1940 the action was defunct, it
was inconceivable for a respectable woman to bring such a case
before the courts. What accounts for this dramatic rise and fall?
This book ties the story of the action's prominence and decline
between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of
woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family.
It argues that the idiosyncratic breach-of-promise suit and
Victorian notions of ideal femininity were inextricably, and
fatally, entwined. It presents the nineteenth-century
breach-of-promise action as a codification of the Victorian ideal
of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this
infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for
the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time
periods - the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian and the
post-Victorian periods - and adopting an interdisciplinary approach
that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history,
and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by
shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with
the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural
inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately
vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two
hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book
examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise
theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse,
to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened
(and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced
the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.
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