Come this Thursday night on the Carleton Place and Beckwith Heritage Museum Walking Tour… Hear stories that you have never heard before-wine women & song and finish the tour at Stalwarts where you will enjoy a free sample of their fine beer.
A lady never wore pearls or diamonds in the morning. Everyone was right and proper. If a woman lifted her dress a little and showed her ankle, it was considered very provocative. Hmm…if an ankle was bad, then why was it okay to enhance and show off your décolletage?
As for showing and enhancing décolletage — until more recent times that was simply for the care and feeding of babies. The ankle was indicating there were legs attached and who knows where THAT could lead! The ages of 21 to 25 years is a favourable age to wed, because: “If she marry young, before her body be properly developed, there would be the danger of an abnormal child-birth.”
In September of 1897 the Almonte Gazette reported that Sudbury had been excited over the mysterious disappearance of Mr. C. Bigar barrister with indications that he had drowned. Searching parties failed to find the body either in the water or the woods though the search had been kept up for weeks.
From 1878 a wife could obtain a separation order on the grounds of her husband’s persistent cruelty, if she was convicted of an aggravated assault upon her. This gave her an incentive to report his violence to the police, because it could be her means of escape. In 1902 the husband’s habitual drunkenness was added to the grounds for legal separation.
The 1857 Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act re-asserted the double standard of fidelity. Simple adultery on the part of the wife was grounds, but adultery on the part of the husband had to be combined with desertion, cruelty, incest, bigamy or practising an ‘unnatural vice’ (sodomy, bestiality, rape of another woman) to be grounds for divorcing him.
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