A Series of Piteous Tales: Divorce Law and Divorce Culture in Early Twentieth-Century New South Wales

Abstract

My thesis addresses the complex inter-relationship between the divorce law and the Divorce Court, and press-based cultural production and consumption, in early twentieth-century New South Wales (1900-1930). Established histories prioritise major legislative developments in 1873 and 1892, and the 1890s divorce boom. I argue that it is equally historically important to consider divorce procedures and public engagement with them outside of these immediate periods of legal change. As divorce debates moved out of the all-male Legislature and into the courtroom, ongoing concerns about social stability, moral integrity and gender relations were expressed through entertaining press reports. Drawing on two bodies of primary evidence—legal transcripts and tabloid newspapers—I consider how the Court and the press exerted influence over each other. Two broad related trends are at the core of this study. Firstly, granted new legal rights under the divorce Extension Act 1892, women petitioners consistently outnumbered male petitioners. Secondly, a journalistic culture dominated by ‘feminised’ melodramatic courtroom narratives flourished alongside the Divorce Court as a place of public theatre. The Court, which demanded public exposure of private suffering, directed the nature of tabloid coverage of divorce proceedings. In turn, press interest in legal procedure had a discernible effect on courtroom happenings. Through this analysis of courtroom proceedings, spectatorship and journalism, it becomes clear that divorce occupied a particularly complex position. It was attached to the rights and status of women, whilst existing within the male-dominated arenas of politics and law. Divorce also fitted into the spaces between law and culture, law and emotion, private and public life, and scandalous entertainment and legal/moral education. The boundaries traditionally constructed between law/politics as masculine and divorce/melodrama as feminine were in reality porous and unstable.