Divorce Saves Lives (Men’s Most of All)
Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash
“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace … is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”
For a long time, women who could marry had little agency within this institution. Our identities were, legally speaking, merged with our husbands, who had the ability to make financial decisions in exchange for the theoretical obligation to protect us (see coverture law). A married woman had no right to manage her assets and property, and, depending on the time period and her citizenship status, there were vast limitations on earning a wage.
No-fault divorce (i.e. being able to end a marriage without having to prove that one party did anything wrong) did not start to get implemented until the 1960s. The women who had the economic privilege to push for a divorce before this time had to legally prove that their husbands were committing adultery, being abusive, or some other legal offense. This requirement was a hurdle that was both traumatizing and difficult to do, in effect barring many women from being able to separate legally.
Some may think that all my fellow women and femmes accepted that state of affairs. Oppressors always want to believe that their victims simply accept unjust hierarchies as passive objects, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Oppression can turn one into a being of vengeance, where the oppressed seek to make those who hurt them suffer.
In fact, one of the time-honored pastimes of women trapped in terrible marriages is simply to kill their husbands.
Women killing their husbands
The murder of terrible husbands is nothing new. There is a stereotype that poison is a woman’s weapon, one ridiculed as weak and cowardly. And while I think that is a mischaracterization — planning a murder of someone who has more power than you in society is incredibly gutsy — it’s a stereotype that has roots in truth.
Many women did use poison.
Take the almost mythical poison Aqua Tofana, which was allegedly used in 17th-century Italy to kill men. It was associated with an underground professional poisoner, Guilia Tofana, who sold the poison to dissatisfied women, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of men in the process (note: Margaret Killjoy has a fantastic podcast summarizing her efforts).
The actual Aqua Tofana concoction is believed to be either arsenic, lead, belladonna, or some combination. It was sold in a cosmetic bottle that could be easily disguised as part of a woman’s toiletries. It was allegedly orderless and tasteless, so women could slip it into their husband or male guardian’s food or drink and then pass off the ensuing symptoms as an unrelated illness of the time.
Arsenic, in particular, was used throughout Europe in the 19th century because it was widely accessible and cheap. In Britain, it was found in everything from wallpaper to rat poison. As Dr. James C. Whorton said in an interview with the History News Network: “…[arsenic] was democratized. Everybody could afford it and there was no control of the sale of it.”
This greater accessibility meant that murders with arsenic unsurprisingly increased. And since women under patriarchy do not have the same entitlements to violence as men, such poisonings became linked in the popular imagination with women. High-profile poisoning cases, such as that of alleged murderer Sarah Chesham, were sensationalized in the press, even though the majority of spousal homicides were still caused by men. As Dr. Whorton continues in that interview:
“Once it became evident that arsenic poisoning was increasing in the 1840s and there were cases of women being arrested and convicted, there was a hysterical overreaction and fear that virtually every woman in the country [of Britain] was trying to find a way to knock off her husband or kids.”
This fear of women using arsenic to murder their husbands, male guardians, and children was such a concern that in 1851, the House of Lords attempted to amend the Sale of Arsenic Regulation Act so that it would forbid women from being able to purchase it legally.
While the Arsenic Scare of the 19th century would die down due to a variety of factors (i.e., better detection, new moral panics emerging, and the rights of women improving, etc.), these old reasons for murder have not gone away. Whether we are talking about Yvonne Godwin, slipping rat poison into her abusive husband’s cake in 2008, or Rebecca Payne slipping sleeping pills into her husband’s favorite cookies in 2023, women still try to kill their husbands because the legal right to divorce does not prevent (some) women from being trapped in abusive and financially restrictive relationships.
Women strike back at their husbands all the time, and the nature of poisonings makes it challenging to know the full scope of these events. Many poisons are slow-acting and difficult to detect without knowing what to test for, and since the law tends to strictly punish women who kill their abusers, there is not exactly an incentive to come clean about it.
You kill your abuser and then let the world think he died of a heart attack, a stroke, or some other natural misfortune.
A deadly conclusion
Now, I don’t want to make it seem like all women killers across history are saints. Women, like men, are people, and some of us can suck. Just this year, Kouri Richins stood trial for allegedly poisoning her husband and then using his death to write a children’s book about processing her grief.
Historically, not all the women who used Aqua Tofana and arsenic were doing so for benign reasons. Some wanted to get an inheritance or estate, and due to the paternalistic nature of the legal system, a man was standing in the way. Others didn’t want the responsibility of motherhood (maybe never did), and so they saw no alternative but to murder their entire family — their children included.
The goal isn’t to say that women are all angels but rather to matter-of-factly point out what inevitably happens when you make divorce harder to do than murder: men get killed.
There has been a lot of talk recently about repealing no-fault divorce. And I look at the men arguing for this fate and wonder if they are aware of the horrors in front of them. Women are not passive objects that will accept the stripping away of our rights. With the right prompting, we can be vengeful ghosts — bent on destroying those in our way.
The men looking to test that wraith should be very afraid.