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The Divorce Bill Before 1857, you could only get a divorce if you applied to Parliament for a private Act. It was a process far beyond the means of most ordinary people, and only four women had ever achieved a divorce in this way. The situation was ironically (and famously) summed up by Mr Justice Maule on 1 April 1845. Detailing the tedious and expensive process for obtaining a divorce, he concluded to a man accused of bigamy: '...altogether you would have had to spend about a thousand or twelve hundred pounds. You will probably tell me that you've never had a thousand farthings of your own in the world. But Prisoner, that makes no difference. This is not a country in which there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.' From 1850 onwards there had been efforts to get a Bill put through Parliament to set up a divorce court. Caroline Norton, herself the victim of an abusive marriage, was an active campaigner for the Act. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 allowed secular divorce for the first time in England and also achieved some significant victories for women. Under the Act a court could order a husband to pay maintenance to a divorced or estranged wife a divorced wife could inherit or bequeath property in her own right a divorced wife could protect her earnings from a husband who had deserted her. There was one respect, though, in which the new Act was weighted in favour of men. A husband only had to prove that his wife had committed adultery but a woman had to prove adultery plus either incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion.
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