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feminists@law, Vol  8, No 1 (2018)


Twentieth Century  Housewives and The Sexual Contract

  Sharon Thompson*
This is a video of a paper given at the Sexual Contract: 30  Years On conference held in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University  on 10-11 May 2018. This paper was part of Panel 1: The Marriage Contract,  chaired by Kathryn McNeilly. The PowerPoint slides accompanying the paper are  available as a separate file.


  “If a wife has a right to the money she can save from her  housekeeping allowance, she might let her husband go short of food while she  builds up a banking account. She might serve him up corned beef instead of  roast beef for dinner.” 



These are  the words of Goddard LJ in Blackwell v Blackwell [1943] 2 All ER 579,  where it was held that Mrs Blackwell’s savings of one hundred pounds ten  shillings in the Oxford and District Co-operative Society were the property of  her husband, from whom Mrs Blackwell had been separated for two years.  Protection of the husband’s roast beef might have been secured, but the  consequences for Mrs Blackwell were severe. Writing in 1967, Lady Summerskill  described her as ‘helpless and hopeless, a victim of a legal system which still  in the twentieth century treats the wife as a chattel of her husband’. 

In this  paper, I argue that The Sexual Contract enriches our understanding of  the lived experiences of twentieth century housewives like Mrs Blackwell by  looking to the root causes of their oppression and finding them in the sexual contract  underpinning marriage. The Sexual Contract also highlights the  shortcomings of ‘conjectural histories’ and the importance of paying attention  to the ‘missing half of the story’. This emphasises the need for a feminist  history of family law, to appreciate the forgotten campaigns of pressure groups  that sought to change the law affecting married women. Drawing on my  forthcoming SLSA funded research, I take the Married Women’s Association as my  focus. This group financed Mrs Blackwell’s unsuccessful appeal in 1943 and  continued to campaign for legal reform of wives’ right to housekeeping money.  Twenty years later, Lady Summerskill’s Married Women’s Property Bill gained  Royal Assent (becoming the Married Women’s Property Act 1964), and provided  that money given by a husband to his wife for housekeeping was to be held by  husband and wife in equal shares. 

Yet as this  paper explores, the story behind this short piece of legislation is often  ignored, and Carole Pateman’s work helps us understand why. Paying attention to  the role of the sexual contract in family law history requires a rewriting of  orthodox history that does not forget women’s struggles for legal equality.  Indeed, to properly understand why the law affecting married women is so  different now, it is imperative that the Married Women’s Association’s  hard-fought campaigns are not overlooked. While their campaigns might not have  always led directly to reform, this group was an example of feminist  activism in the mid-twentieth century that emphasised the inequity of the  current law and created pressure for change.

 



  
    * Senior  Lecturer in Law, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University, Wales. Email:  thompsons20@cardiff.ac.uk

  



