Early nineteenth-century court records of divorce contain many startling stories. In some of these stories, the actions of a violent spouse transform a home from a life-giving to a life-destroying place. In many, women and their children are compelled to search for alternative places to go, to build new homes. Some victims were successful; others were not able to extricate themselves from violent marriages. My paper explores what these stories can tell us about the ways in which the problem of family violence was understood in the antebellum Northeast. More specifically, it asks what women and children could do and where they might go when the space of the home became a threatening one.

Drawing on legal narratives of domestic abuse, as well as those produced by temperance and women's rights reformers, I argue that the experience of violence in the home led some women and reformers of this time and place to imagine, and, on occasion, to create different kinds of homes. While the courts sometimes provided abused women with concrete but limited assistance in building new lives (occasional orders of restraint for husbands, return of property), reformers envisioned utopic possibilities (-temperance homes," cooperative women's households). Charting such parallels and divergences between legal and reformist understandings of domestic violence, my work contributes a new perspective on the relationship between antebellum reform movements and women's legal experiences in the period. In so doing, this paper offers an innovative approach to telling the history of family violence.

The paper will take as its focal point a number of stories of marital abuse, found in the Suffolk County court records of divorce and marital separation (1830-1860). In the course of this research I have found that approximately 200 out of 1203 divorce cases involved charges of "cruelty." Of these, about a quarter were dismissed. Two examples illustrate the range of possible outcomes for "libellants." Matilda Dockham's story survives in her 1833 libel for divorce from her violent husband, her petition filed in the following year asking the Court to restrain her former husband from harassing her and her children, as well as supporting records of her prior and subsequent life. Subsequent to her divorce, Matilda lost all of her property, her husband preferring time in jail over giving it up. Census, vital, and probate records show that she spent the rest of her life residing with various of her siblings in turn. In contrast, fewer records remain of Ellen Fox's story: her 1852 petition for a divorce from bed and board was dismissed, and four years later her husband James was found guilty of her murder.

Stories like these helped to propel temperance and women's rights advocates of the period to fight for liberalized divorce laws. Examining the mid-nineteenth century debate over divorce, legal historian Norma Basch has asked what remedy the rising number of divorces actually provided for women, noting that financial provisions for female plaintiffs were weak and that divorce often went along with a decline in status for women. My paper examines in concrete detail what happened to women and men in the aftermath of divorce petitions charging cruelty, whether granted or dismissed. Where did divorced and legally separated women go? Did those whose libels were dismissed go home (as in the case of Ellen Fox), or did they desert their husbands? This kind of approach offers a vivid picture of antebellum Boston women's experiences of domestic violence, and their efforts to find new places and ways to live, to create a new kinds of homes. By looking with equal attention at dismissed cases, separations, and divorces, and by placing legal narratives in the context of reformers' rhetoric, I hope to illuminate the imagined possibilities for battered women in this period, as well as the concrete economic, social and legal constraints on those possibilities.