
"Why, you are nothing then: neither maid, widow, nor wife": separated wives in early modern England
- Dr Anna French
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This paper will explore Professor Froide’s recent work on separated women in early modern England, where nothing determined a woman's identity more than her marital status. Whether a woman was single, married, or widowed determined her legal, social, and economic opportunities. But in an era when the average person had no access to divorce, there was a fourth category of women: separated wives.
These women had married but lived apart from their spouses, either informally or via a legal separation. Neither married nor unmarried, such women occupied a liminal position both socially and legally. This paper will examine the experiences of separated wives, to determine how these women negotiated their intermediate marital status.