It is not strange, therefore, that no woman protested publicly against a husband’s infidelity until 1801.  Up to 1840 there were but three cases of a woman’s taking the initiative in divorce, namely, in 1801, 1831, and 1840; and in each case the man’s adultery was aggravated by other offences.  In two other suits the Lords rejected the petition of the wife, although the misconduct of the husband was clearly proved.  But redress was still by the elaborate machinery of Act of Parliament and hence a luxury only for the wealthy until 1857, when a special Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes was established.[405] Nevertheless, the law as it stands to-day is not of a character to excite admiration or to prove the existence of the proverbial “British Fair Play.”  A husband can obtain a divorce upon proof of his wife’s infidelity; but the wife can get it only by proving, in addition to the husband’s adultery, either that it was aggravated by bigamy or incest or that it was accompanied by cruelty or by two years’ desertion.  Misconduct by the husband bars him from obtaining a divorce.  The court is empowered to regulate at its discretion the property rights of divorced people and the custody of the children.[406] All attempts have failed to make the law recognise that the misconduct of the husband shall be regarded equally as culpable as the wife’s.

[Sidenote:  Rape and the age of legal consent.]

We may pause a moment to glance at the provisions made by the criminal law for protecting women.  The offence that most closely touches women is rape.  The punishment of this in Blackstone’s day was death[407]; but in the next century the death penalty was repealed and transportation for life substituted.[408] The saddest blot on a presumably Christian civilisation connected with this matter is the so-called “age of legal consent.”  Under the older Common Law this was ten or twelve; in 1885 it was thirteen, at which period a girl was supposed to be at an age to know what she was doing.  But in the year 1885 Mr. Stead told the London public very plainly those hideous truths about crimes against young girls which everybody knew very well had been going on for centuries, but which no one ever before had dared to assert.  The result was that Parliament raised the “age of legal consent” to sixteen, where it now stands.[409] The idea that any girl of this age is sufficiently mature to know what she is doing by consenting to the lust of scoundrels is a fine commentary on the acuteness of the legal intellect and the high moral convictions of legislators.

[Sidenote:  Women’s rights to an education.]