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asserting, in fact, that she ‘never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality’. She married, she once admitted, partly because she ‘particularly dreaded’ the prospect of ‘living and dying an old maid’. But she found herself, in 1826, tied to a husband who soon proved hopelessly uncongenial. Their relationship gradually deteriorated, and broke down in scenes of outright violence. Eventually, Norton not only refused his wife access to her own property (everything she had inherited, and everything that she later earned); he denied her all contact with her three children.
    He vengefully pushed her into a harsh public spotlight, making her the focus of scandal when he (probably unjustifiably) accused her of adultery with the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. Though minism
    the case was dismissed, Caroline Norton understandably felt Fe
    humiliated and betrayed, and her reputation was permanently tarnished.
    Norton could not go to law to defend or protect herself, or to argue her rights of access to her own children, because, she discovered, a married woman had no legal existence. ‘It is a hard thing to feel legally so helpless and dependent while in fact I am as able to support myself as an intelligent man working in a modest profession’, she complained. In 1838, she supported the passing of a bill reforming an Infants Custody Act which gave a mother limited rights over her children until they were 7, and in 1854 and 1855, she produced pamphlets based on her own case: The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered and English Laws for Women in the 19th Century , both of which reached a wide audience. ‘I have learned the law respecting married women piecemeal, but suffering every one of its defects of protection’, she remarked. In her 1855 Letter to the Queen 48
    supporting a proposed bill on the Reform of Marriage and Divorce, she wrote that ‘I believe in my obscurer position that I am permitted to be the example on which a particular law shall be reformed’. A Divorce Reform Act was passed in 1857, but the circumstances in which a woman could file for divorce remained very limited.
    Though Norton’s life dramatically illustrated some of the cruel anomalies in the status of married women, hers was certainly not a solitary, or even an unusual, case. Charlotte Brontë, for example, when she married not long before she died, discovered that her husband owned the copyright to her novels, as well as everything she earned. But Caroline Norton dissociated herself from other women who, in the mid-1850s were beginning to meet together Th
    over women’s issues, and who soon took up the cause that her case e early 19th centur
    had publicized; indeed, a Married Women’s Property Committee, set up by the group known as ‘the Ladies of Langham Place’, was probably the first organized feminist group in England. But Caroline Norton, perhaps feeling that she had been too much in the y: public eye, perhaps anxious to retain at least the shreds of her reformin
    reputation, kept her distance.
    g w
    Florence Nightingale was another remarkable woman who flatly ome
    refused to be associated with the emerging women’s movement, n
    though, in the long run, her example proved inspiring, and much more effective than anything she actually said. She famously remarked that ‘I am brutally indifferent to the wrongs or the rights of my sex’, and insisted that if women are unemployed ‘it is because they won’t work’. She would be prepared to pay a woman well to act as her secretary, she once said, but could find no one who was either able or willing to take on the work. But she herself came up sharply against the way society divided the sexes and constricted women’s lives. The daughter of a well-off and well-connected family, she complained that she was a martyr to genteel and leisured femininity. Why, she asked sarcastically, would it be ‘more ridiculous for a man than a