On 17 August 1839, passage of an Act to Amend the Law Relating to the Custody of Infants. The Act allowed a separated wife to petition the court for custody of her children under the age of seven. Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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Rachel Ablow, “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act”

Kelly Hager, “Chipping Away at Coverture: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857″

Jill Rappoport, “Wives and Sons: Coverture, Primogeniture, and Married Women’s Property”

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by David Rettenmaier

On 28 August 1857, passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. The Act legalized divorce and protected a divorced woman’s property and future earnings. The grounds for divorce for men was adultery (in legal terms, criminal conversation), for women adultery combined with bigamy, incest, bestiality, sodomy, desertion, cruelty, or rape. Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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Kelly Hager, “Chipping Away at Coverture: The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857″

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Rachel Ablow, “‘One Flesh,’ One Person, and the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act”

Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, “The Moxon Tennyson as Textual Event: 1857, Wood Engraving, and Visual Culture”

Jill Rappoport, “Wives and Sons: Coverture, Primogeniture, and Married Women’s Property”

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On 9 August 1870, the Married Women’s Property Act was passed. Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

This Act established limited protections for some separate property for married women, including the right to retain up to £200 of any earning or inheritance. Before this all of a woman's property owned before her marriage, as well as all acquired after the marriage, automatically became her husband's alone. Only women whose families negotiated different terms in a marriage contract were able to retain control of some portion of their property.

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Rachel Ablow, "On the Married Woman's Property Act, 1870"

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Anne Wallace, “On the Deceased Wife’s Sister Controversy, 1835-1907″

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by David Rettenmaier

Criminal Law Amendment Act passed on 14 August 1885. The Act raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16 and introduced the misdemeanor of “gross indecency” to criminalize sexual acts between men in public or private. Image: The Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

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by David Rettenmaier

The trials of Oscar Wilde, which occurred in April and May of 1895, have become legendary as a turning-point in the history of public awareness of homosexuality. By their close, Wilde had gone from being a triumphantly successful playwright to a ruined man, condemned to two years of hard labor for gross indecency. They garnered extensive coverage first in the London press and then in newspapers around the world; the story of the trials continues to be retold in ways that have persistent relevance for contemporary queer culture. Image: Photograph of Oscar Wilde, by Napoleon Sarony. This image is in the public domain in the United States because its copyright has expired.

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Andrew Elfenbein, “On the Trials of Oscar Wilde: Myths and Realities”

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by David Rettenmaier

In 1896, fragments of Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic novella Under the Hill are published in the journal Savoy. Offering a Decadent reworking of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (1845), the text dwells upon the eponymous character’s sexual adventures in the realm of Venus. In 1907, publisher Leonard Smithers issues an enlarged version of the novella which includes some previously censored material. The work is translated into Russian (1905/1907) and German.

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Sasha Dovzhyk, "The Queer Little Grove: The Adoption of Aubrey Bearsley by Mikhail Kuzmin"

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by David Rettenmaier

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by Carrie Sickmann