Visualizzazione post con etichetta #leeson mogli. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta #leeson mogli. Mostra tutti i post

lunedì 10 ottobre 2016

Vendere la moglie all'asta

La vendita della moglie all’asta è una pratica barbara? Forse, ma nella storia riveste lo statuto di antesignana del divorzio. La nostra mancanza di prospettiva storica è sempre foriera di sorprese. Eppure il Peter Leeson di “Wife Sales” parla chiaro.
Ecco la sua tesi:
…  We argue that wife sales were an institutional response to an unusual constellation of property rights in Industrial Revolution-era English law… That constellation simultaneously required most wives to obtain their husbands’consent to exit… and denied most wives the right to own property… Our analysis of wife sales as a mechanism of indirect Coasean bargaining supports the view that such sales enhanced the welfare of Industrial Revolution-era English wives… A sufficiently unhappy spouse will be willing to pay his or her marital partner enough to secure the right to exit marriage when one or both spouses has veto rights over the decision to divorce…
Per una donna era praticamente impossibile divorziare. Se solo avesse potuto pagare il marito le sue opportunità di farlo si sarebbero accresciute, senonché con il matrimonio perdeva le sue ricchezze e la possibilità di stipulare contratti economici validi. Ecco, con la vendita all’asta poteva trovare qualcuno in grado di contrattare e pagare il divorzio in suo nome. Sempre fermo il fatto che poteva porre il veto alla vendita.
… the wives who participated in wife sales chose to participate, and even those who seemed to do so reluctantly had the power to veto their sales….
La vendita della moglie all’asta non era una procedura misogina ma una procedura anti-misogina in un contesto misogino.
… Wife sales permitted unhappy wives to trade marriages they valued less for marriages they valued more…
La teoria riceve indiretta conferma dal fatto che la pratica era particolarmente diffusa nei paesi considerati avanzati.  
… For over a century wife sales occurred throughout the world’s most economically civilized nation during an era of unprecedented growth and progress: Industrial Revolution-era England…
Ma conserva anche dei problemi: in fondo il divorzio di fatto poteva contare su procedure alternative.
… The existence of numerous “ordinary” methods of de facto divorce in Industrial Revolution-era England, such as judicial separation and private separation agreement, poses a puzzle
Una prima risposta:
… Historians have suggested an answer to this puzzle: wife sales were public…   English law imposed marital obligations on spouses, such as husbands’responsibility for debts their wives incurred on their behalf. To relieve themselves of these obligations in their community’s eyes, divorcing spouses needed to inform community members, such as potential creditors, that their marital obligations to one another had ended.
Ma:
… This “explanation” for wife sales is unsatisfying in a simple but crucial way… Spouses could place ads in newspapers
Ricordiamoci che in quelle società la donna single aveva fondamentalmente gli stessi diritti dell’uomo:
… feme sole... Such a woman could own property, enter contracts, and enjoyed freedom of her person. In these respects, legally, she was like a man..
Se invece sceglieva di sposarsi, in cambio della protezione ricevuta, diventava praticamente una proprietà del marito:
… all the property she owned before marriage, and all that would have come into her possession as an unmarried woman, such as inheritance, her wages from working, and the revenues generated by real estate she formerly owned, became her husband’s exclusive property.  A married woman also lost the right to enter contracts….Her husband could beat her “within reason.” He could have sexual relations with her on demand. And he could “restrain a wife of her liberty”— i.e., imprison her in his home— “in case of any gross misbehaviour,” where he determined what constituted grossness… In return for surrendering her property rights to her husband, a woman who married received a legal claim to her and, if she had any children, her children’s, maintenance from her husband.
Tuttavia, le donne preferivano di gran lunga sposarsi, soprattutto perché sul libero mercato del lavoro i loro servigi erano poco apprezzati. La cosa, del resto, conveniva anche agli uomini:
… Compared to men, Industrial Revolution-era women’ s employment prospects were slim and the wages they earned were low. Many working-class women couldn’t earn enough to support themselves… Men also benefited from marriage. They enjoyed the economies of scale that marriage conferred…
Per quanto riguarda il divorzio, c’era un abisso tra teoria e pratica:
… In theory, Industrial Revolution-era English law granted husbands and wives the right to exit marriage— with or without their spouse’s consent— under only two circumstances: adultery and life-threatening cruelty. In practice, husbands tended to enjoy unilateral property rights over marriage…
Il divorzio vero e proprio era molto costoso e accessibile quindi solo agli uomini (che detenevano la ricchezza):
… After obtaining a judicial separation, the typical husband seeking a private Act of Parliament sued his wife’s lover for criminal conversation in a civil court. Victory here was helpful to proving to Parliament that his wife was an adulterer. Having satisfied Parliament of as much, the Act-seeking husband secured a divorce from his wife that freed him of all…nancial obligations to her and permitted both spouses to remarry. The cost of this process was enormous… a private Act of Parliament could run into the thousands of pounds. In 1871 a successful unskilled laborer earned a mere 75p a week…
dati parlano chiaro, solo con una famiglia di provenienza estremamente facoltosa ed influente alle spalle la donna poteva spuntarla:
… An unhappy wife could also seek divorce through a private Act of Parliament. But… the obstacles to success she faced were far greater… of the 338 persons who attempted to divorce their spouses using a private Act of Parliament in the 157 years from this instrument’s inception in 1700 to its termination in 1857, only 8 were wives. 318 husbands petitioned successfully, but only 4 wives did so…
Restava l’arma delle separazioni o divorzi di fatto. Per gli uomini tutto era facile, nella sostanza valeva il ripudio:
… An unhappy husband could obtain a judicial separation by proving his wife had committed adultery. In this case the court would award him an alimony free separation. Even without such proof, he could obtain a judicial separation indirectly by manipulating the law’s operation. He did this by kicking his wife out of his house… Under English law husbands were required to supply their wives housing. This was part of their maintenance obligation. If a husband exiled his wife, his wife could, through an agent, sue her husband for restitution of conjugal rights — the right to cohabit — in an ecclesiastic court. The husband could then refuse to allow her back into his home, at which point the court would award a separation and alimony for the wife. If he was unsatisfied with paying his wife alimony, a husband could wait for his wife to slip and sue her in an ecclesiastic court for adultery. This freed him from future alimony payments…
Per le donne la musica era diversa:
… For an unhappy wife, separating from her spouse judicially was much harder. In principle the law allowed wives to sue for judicial separation on the grounds of adultery or life-threatening cruelty… An  important constraint on an unhappy wife’ s ability to use judicial separation to divorce her husband was the fact that judicial separation left her in a state of feme covert
Anche la fuga solitaria non era una via praticabile:
… Wives were in large part their husbands’property. Thus the law permitted husbands to forcibly return deserting wives to their homes where they could con… ne them to prevent future escape…
La fuga con l’amante era altrettanto problematica:
… elopement posed another problem for unhappy wives: it could be hard to build relationships with lovers willing to run away with them in secret. Husbands exercised close oversight over their wives…
L’unica scappatoia era l’accordo:
… The…nal means of de facto divorce in Industrial Revolution-era England was private separation agreements. These agreements were contracts between spouses relieving them of some of marriage’s obligations….
Ma senza possibilità di conguaglio gli accordi disponibili si riducevano drasticamente. Inoltre c’era il problema della validità di questi contratti.
… Unfortunately, not all unhappy wives were able to use private separation agreements for this purpose. Until the 1840s, such agreements were not reliably enforceable… This meant, for example, that a husband who agreed to separate from his wife under a private contract but subsequently changed his mind might forcibly seize her to reestablish cohabitation or, similarly, sue for the restitution of his conjugal rights and do so successfully…
Se questo è il contesto, comincia a profilarsi come razionale la possibilità di vendere la moglie.
… If transaction costs were low, when a wife valued life outside her marriage more than her husband valued life inside it, she could simply buy the right to exit the marriage from him… crucial assumption: wives must have something with which they can buy the right to exit marriage from their husbands…. Wife sales achieve this by leveraging the property rights of third parties: “suitors” who value unhappy wives more than wives’current husbands value them… To identify the suitor whose valuation is highest, inefficiently married couples sell their better halves at public auctions… Wives’veto power over their sales is crucial to such an arrangement’…
Il geniale artificio beneficiava soprattutto i meno abbienti. La procedura adottata era simile a quella impiegata per il bestiame.
… Industrial Revolution-era English wife sales were used overwhelmingly by working-class couples…. Next his wife was auctioned o ¤ amidst cattle and horses. An auctioneer prefaced the bidding by extolling the virtues of the wife on the block… The wife sale terminated one marriage and began another. To formalize such sales, the parties involved sometimes procured the services of a lawyer… “in many instances the wife appears to have been retained because she did not like her purchaser”… The necessity of wives’consent to be sold to new husbands explains the happiness many wives displayed at their sales’ conclusion…
Spesso era l’amante a comprare. Il che spiega anche come molte vendite si concludessero saltando l’asta vera e propria.
… For example, one couple decided that they should resort to a wife sale “hav[ ing] lately lived together on unpleasant terms, in consequence of the wife having a strong ‘affinity’ for a man on the opposite side of the street” (The Illustrated Police News, November 19, 1870)… The frequent existence of a ready and likely high bidder— a wife’ s lover— explains why some wife sales were transacted without auctions
Altre volta la moglie era riscattata da membri della famiglia di origine.
… In other cases wives’winning bidders weren’t men seeking new mates at all. They were wives’ family members
Bisogna anche considerare cos’era il diritto nella GB dell’epoca: le procedure informali consolidate avevano molto più valore di oggi, specie in quei paesi anglo-sassoni che sacralizzavano la “common law”:
…  while the law did not consider divorces or marriages achieved through wife sales legitimate, several jurists expressed confusion about whether wife selling per se was prohibited… it was founded on a custom preserved by the people, a custom, perhaps, that it would even be dangerous to pass a law which abolished it”… Religious authorities’attitudes toward wife sales were equally confused. Some religious authorities condemned wife selling. But others seemed to condone it, if not in word, in practice…
L’asta delle mogli fu un’istituzione molto apprezzata a giudicare dal successo riscosso, evidentemente produceva soddisfazione diffusa. Andò calando allorché la legge cominciò a riconoscere dei diritti patrimoniali alle mogli. Tutto cio’ è in linea con la teoria.
…Between 1735 and 1899 the mean wife in our sample sold for £ 5.72, though prices vary signi… cantly by decade. In every decade, however, both mean and median wife prices are positive… Wife sales decline when English law grants wives property rights… This new legal environment greatly diminished the importance of wife sales as means for unhappy wives to purchase the right to exit their ine ¢ cient marriages from their husbands indirectly. In consequence, wife sales declined precipitously…Although wife sales didn’ t become exceptional until the turn of the 20th century, their usage may have begun to go into decline some 17 years before the…rst English legal change granting wives some property…
COMMENTI PERSONALI
Chissà che la vendita all’asta della moglie non fu anche un antidoto al femminicidio. In fondo è un modo di concludere una relazione senza ferire l’orgoglio maschile. Oggi che conosciamo meglio le dinamiche di questo crimine sappiamo quanto sia preziosa una simile risorsa.
 wife

lunedì 12 settembre 2016

Wife Sales Peter Leeson

Notebook per
Wife_Sales
Peter Leeson
Citation (APA): Leeson, P. (2014). Wife_Sales [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com

Parte introduttiva
Nota - Posizione 2
1 il divorzio solo col consenso del marito 2 le donne nn avevano proprietà da offrire => l asta delle mogli aggirava l ostacolo consentendo a un terzo di fare l offerta xchè la vendita domina le alternative? xchè è pubblica potere di veto: l asta aumenta il bemessere delle donne
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Wife Sales Peter T. Leesony
Nota - Posizione 2
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 3
We argue that wife sales were an institutional response to an unusual constellation of property rights in Industrial Revolution-era English law.
Nota - Posizione 4
TESI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 4
That constellation simultaneously required most wives to obtain their husbands’consent to exit
Nota - Posizione 4
DIVORZIO E PROP.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
denied most wives the right to own property.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 7
Wife-sale auctions achieved this by identifying and leveraging “suitors”— men who valued unhappy wives more than their current husbands,
Nota - Posizione 8
PAGARE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 15
1 Introduction
Nota - Posizione 15
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 25
For over a century wife sales occurred throughout the world’s most economically civilized nation during an era of unprecedented growth and progress: Industrial Revolution-era England.
Nota - Posizione 26
NEL PAESE PIÙ RICCO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 27
Wife sales were one among a variety of much more mundane methods of dissolving marriage de facto in a time and place where doing so de jure was extraordinarily di ¢ cult
Nota - Posizione 28
DIVORZIO DI FATTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 29
The existence of numerous “ordinary” methods of de facto divorce in Industrial Revolution-era England, such as judicial separation and private separation agreement, poses a puzzle
Nota - Posizione 30
PROBLEMA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 31
Historians have suggested an answer to this puzzle: wife sales were public
Nota - Posizione 32
PUBBLICITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 32
English law imposed marital obligations on spouses, such as husbands’responsibility for debts their wives incurred on their behalf. To relieve themselves of these obligations in their community’s eyes, divorcing spouses needed to inform community members, such as potential creditors, that their marital obligations to one another had ended.
Nota - Posizione 35
SCISSIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 36
This “explanation” for wife sales is unsatisfying in a simple but crucial way. It doesn’ t explain wife sales’most important and intriguing feature: the sale of wives.
Nota - Posizione 37
INSODDISF
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 41
Spouses could place ads in newspapers;
Nota - Posizione 41
GIORNALI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 63
Our analysis of wife sales as a mechanism of indirect Coasean bargaining supports the view that such sales enhanced the welfare of Industrial Revolution-era English wives.
Nota - Posizione 64
BENFICIO X LE DONNE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 64
the wives who participated in wife sales chose to participate, and even those who seemed to do so reluctantly had the power to veto their sales.
Nota - Posizione 65
VETO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 67
Wife sales permitted unhappy wives to trade marriages they valued less for marriages they valued more.
Nota - Posizione 67
IMHO: FEMMINICIDIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 89
A su ¢ ciently unhappy spouse will be willing to pay his or her marital partner enough to secure the right to exit marriage when one or both spouses has veto rights over the decision to divorce.
Nota - Posizione 90
DIVORZIO COASIANO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 99
2.1 Marriage in Industrial Revolution-Era England
Nota - Posizione 100
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 100
feme sole. Such a woman could own property, enter contracts, and enjoyed freedom of her person. In these respects, legally, she was like a man.
Nota - Posizione 101
LA SINGLE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 102
all the property she owned before marriage, and all that would have come into her possession as an unmarried woman, such as inheritance, her wages from working, and the revenues generated by real estate she formerly owned, became her husband’s exclusive property. 6 A married woman also lost the right to enter contracts.
Nota - Posizione 104
SPOSATA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 106
Her husband could beat her “within reason.” He could have sexual relations with her on demand. And he could “restrain a wife of her liberty”— i.e., imprison her in his home— “in case of any gross misbehaviour,” where he determined what constituted grossness (Hill 1994: 199).
Nota - Posizione 108
PROP. DRL MARITO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 110
In return for surrendering her property rights to her husband, a woman who married received a legal claim to her and, if she had any children, her children’s, maintenance from her husband.
Nota - Posizione 111
PROTENZIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 125
Compared to men, Industrial Revolution-era women’ s employment prospects were slim and the wages they earned were low. Many working-class women couldn’t earn enough to support themselves,
Nota - Posizione 126
LE DONNE BENRFIVIAVANO DAL MATRIMONIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 127
Men also bene… ted from marriage. They enjoyed the economies of scale that marriage conferred.
Nota - Posizione 128
... ANCHE GLI U.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 129
2.2 Divorce in Industrial Revolution-Era England
Nota - Posizione 129
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 133
In theory, Industrial Revolution-era English law granted husbands and wives the right to exit marriage— with or without their spouse’s consent— under only two circumstances: adultery and life-threatening cruelty. In practice, husbands tended to enjoy unilateral property rights over marriage.
Nota - Posizione 135
TEORIA E PRATICA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 154
After obtaining a judicial separation, the typical husband seeking a private Act of Parliament sued his wife’s lover for criminal conversation in a civil court. 10 Victory here was helpful to proving to Parliament that his wife was an adulterer. Having satis… ed Parliament of as much, the Act-seeking husband secured a divorce from his wife that freed him of all…nancial obligations to her and permitted both spouses to remarry. The cost of this process was enormous.
Nota - Posizione 157
COSTI ENORMI AMCHE SE LA MOGLIE È FEDIFRAGA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 157
a private Act of Parliament could run into the thousands of pounds. In 1871 a successful unskilled laborer earned a mere 75p a week
Nota - Posizione 158
COSTI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 159
An unhappy wife could also seek divorce through a private Act of Parliament. But
Nota - Posizione 160
MOGLIE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 164
the obstacles to success she faced were far greater.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 168
of the 338 persons who attempted to divorce their spouses using a private Act of Parliament in the 157 years from this instrument’s inception in 1700 to its termination in 1857, only 8 were wives. 318 husbands petitioned successfully, but only 4 wives did so
Nota - Posizione 170
SUCCESSI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 172
An unhappy husband could obtain a judicial separation by proving his wife had committed adultery. In this case the court would award him an alimony free separation. Even without such proof, he could obtain a judicial separation indirectly by manipulating the law’s operation. He did this by kicking his wife out of his house.
Nota - Posizione 174
MARITI DE FACTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 178
For an unhappy wife, separating from her spouse judicially was much harder. In principle the law allowed wives to sue for judicial separation on the grounds of adultery or life-threatening cruelty.
Nota - Posizione 180
DE FACTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 184
An equally important constraint on an unhappy wife’ s ability to use judicial separation to divorce her husband was the fact that judicial separation left her in a state of feme covert.
Nota - Posizione 185
ALTRO OSTACOLO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 206
Wives were in large part their husbands’property. Thus the law permitted husbands to forcibly return deserting wives to their homes where they could con… ne them to prevent future escape.
Nota - Posizione 207
DESERTING
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 211
elopement posed another problem for unhappy wives: it could be hard to build relationships with lovers willing to run away with them in secret. Husbands exercised close oversight over their wives.
Nota - Posizione 212
FUGA D AMORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 215
The…nal means of de facto divorce in Industrial Revolution-era England was private separation agreements. These agreements were contracts between spouses relieving them of some of marriage’s obligations.
Nota - Posizione 216
ACCORDO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 224
Unfortunately, not all unhappy wives were able to use private separation agreements for this purpose. Until the 1840s, such agreements were not reliably enforceable
Nota - Posizione 225
INCO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 226
This meant, for example, that a husband who agreed to separate from his wife under a private contract but subsequently changed his mind might forcibly seize her to reestablish cohabitation or, similarly, sue for the restitution of his conjugal rights and do so successfully.
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 241
Wives with signi… cant premarital wealth could hire lawyers to make prenuptial agreements that created agent-controlled trusts. These trusts granted wives continued rights over property they owned before marriage and the revenues‡owing from it.
Nota - Posizione 243
ACCORDI PREMAYTRIMONIALE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 246
3 A Theory of Wife Sales
Nota - Posizione 246
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 248
If transaction costs were low, when a wife valued life outside her marriage more than her husband valued life inside it, she could simply buy the right to exit the marriage from him.
Nota - Posizione 249
COASE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 250
crucial assumption: wives must have something with which they can buy the right to exit marriage from their husbands.
Nota - Posizione 251
ASSUNTO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 253
Wife sales achieve this by leveraging the property rights of third parties: “suitors” who value unhappy wives more than wives’current husbands value them,
Nota - Posizione 254
TERZO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 256
To identify the suitor whose valuation is highest, ine ¢ ciently married couples sell their better halves at public auctions.
Nota - Posizione 256
ASTE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 261
Wives’veto power over their sales is crucial to such an arrangement’
Nota - Posizione 262
VETO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 274
3.1 From Alter to Halter
Nota - Posizione 274
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 274
Industrial Revolution-era English wife sales were used overwhelmingly by working-class couples.
Nota - Posizione 275
WORKING CLASS
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 292
Next his wife was auctioned o ¤ amidst cattle and horses. An auctioneer prefaced the bidding by extolling the virtues of the wife on the block.
Nota - Posizione 293
BESTIE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 314
The wife sale terminated one marriage and began another. To formalize such sales, the parties involved sometimes procured the services of a lawyer
Nota - Posizione 315
MATRIMONIO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 325
“in many instances the wife appears to have been retained because she did not like her purchaser”( Menefee 1981: 109).
Nota - Posizione 326
VETO
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 335
The necessity of wives’consent to be sold to new husbands explains the happiness many wives displayed at their sales’ conclusion.
Nota - Posizione 336
FELICITÀ
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 347
For example, one couple decided that they should resort to a wife sale “hav[ ing] lately lived together on unpleasant terms, in consequence of the wife having a strong ‘a ¢ nity’ for a man on the opposite side of the street” (The Illustrated Police News, November 19, 1870).
Nota - Posizione 349
AMANTE COMPRASTORE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 364
The frequent existence of a ready and likely high bidder— a wife’ s lover— explains why some wife sales were transacted without auctions
Nota - Posizione 365
SENZ ASTA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 373
In other cases wives’winning bidders weren’t men seeking new mates at all. They were wives’family members,
Nota - Posizione 374
AFAMILY MEMBERS
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 381
while the law did not consider divorces or marriages achieved through wife sales legitimate, several jurists expressed confusion about whether wife selling per se was prohibited.
Nota - Posizione 382
CONFUSIOONE LEGISLATIVA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 383
it was founded on a custom preserved by the people, a custom, perhaps, that it would even be dangerous to pass a law which abolished it”
Nota - Posizione 384
CONSUETUDINE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 386
Religious authorities’attitudes toward wife sales were equally confused. Some religious authorities condemned wife selling. But others seemed to condone it, if not in word, in practice.
Nota - Posizione 387
RELIGIOSIVGONFUSI
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 395
4 Predictions and Evidence
Nota - Posizione 395
T
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 396
1. Wife-sale prices are positive.
Nota - Posizione 396
PRIMA PREVISIONE CONFRRMATA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 431
Between 1735 and 1899 the mean wife in our sample sold for £ 5.72, though prices vary signi… cantly by decade. In every decade, however, both mean and median wife prices are positive.
Nota - Posizione 432
EVIDENZW
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 437
2. Wife sales decline when English law grants wives property rights.
Nota - Posizione 437
CONDA PREVISIONE
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 468
This new legal environment greatly diminished the importance of wife sales as means for unhappy wives to purchase the right to exit their ine ¢ cient marriages from their husbands indirectly. In consequence, wife sales declined precipitously.
Nota - Posizione 470
CONFERMA
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 480
Although wife sales didn’ t become exceptional until the turn of the 20th century, their usage may have begun to go into decline some 17 years before the…rst English legal change granting wives some property
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 505
5 Concluding Remarks
Nota - Posizione 505
T