| The Library of Virginia >> Exhibitions >> Working Out Her Destiny | ||
 |
||
|
Where are the Women: Examples from the LVA Collections Abuse and Independence |
||
|
Introduction Where are the Women: |
|
|
|
The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion. Thomas E. Buckley, S. J. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Bound volume. Library of Virginia. |
In her 1816 petition to the General Assembly, Ann Pierce Parker Cowper detailed the physical abuse and other misbehavior of her husband, William Cowper, from whom she requested a bill of divorce. He had squandered and attempted fraudulently to obtain control over her inheritance and the property that their son had inherited from his maternal grandfather; and he beat and abused her during several years in incidents that sank to the depths of attempted murder and an attempt to induce a miscarriage during her fourth pregnancy. (That child, Leopold Copeland Parker Cowper, survived and was lieutenant governor of Virginia from 1863 to 1869.)
Ann Cowper's long but successful struggle for legal independence
reveals how difficult it was under the law for wives to protect the
interests of their children and themselves from abusive or
irresponsible husbands. In order to make her case persuasively to
the assembly, she began her petition with the distinguished career
of her father in the Continental army and in the House of
Representatives and included appeals to the sympathy and sense of
justice of the legislators. In the third-person language of formal
petitions, Cowper wrote, "Her wish is to support and educate her
children, to resque them from vice and ignorance (to which they are
now exposed under their father) and bring them up in piety and
virtue." |
|
|
Such language reveals much about the fundamental values of the society and the responsibilities that women and mothers were expected to exercise, as well as the limitations on their freedom of independent action. |
||
