Before Women Could Choose Divorce, They Chose Poison: The Dark History Of Fatal Feminism
Farzin Yarahmadi | Canva In modern America, women now initiate 70% of divorces — and among college-educated women, that number jumps to 90%. Why the sudden surge of female dissatisfaction? Ask the Manosphere, and they’ll tell you that modern women just don’t value relationships the way their mothers and grandmothers did.
But according to divorce lawyers and couples therapists, women are still handling the majority of domestic and emotional labor, even though they’re bringing in their own money. For the first time in history, they also have the legal right to terminate their marriages, open bank accounts in their own names, and purchase their own homes.
In other words, women no longer have to tolerate bad relationships, so they’re choosing not to. People love to blame debauchery and dating apps for the deterioration of marriage — but historically, women didn’t stay married because they wanted to.
Women stayed married because they had no choice
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In the Georgian Era, only a Private Act of Parliament could grant you a divorce, and that was expensive as hell. (It cost roughly £1,000, which is about $185,000 today.) From 1700 to 1857, only 314 divorces were granted in the United Kingdom, mostly to men.
In the Victorian Era, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 transferred divorce from Parliament to a civil court. This made divorce slightly easier and slightly less expensive — again, for husbands. Victorian men could divorce their wives for adultery alone, but Victorian women had to prove cheating and physical cruelty, desertion, incest, or bigamy.
In Colonial America, a wife had to plead her case to a tribunal of judges and prove that her husband had committed adultery. If the judges granted her a divorce (most didn’t), she’d get nothing — no land, no money, no belongings — and her children would go live with their father.
Finally, by the 1950s, reformers started advocating for no-fault divorce, meaning that either spouse could end a marriage simply because they wanted to. Yet it wasn’t until 2010 — just 15 years ago — that all 50 states legalized the practice.
For centuries, women were bought and sold like cattle. Married off to husbands decades older than them. Forced to cook, clean, and birth children. Trapped in relationships they didn’t choose, with no money and no way to escape.
So what’s a desperate gal to do?
She poisoned her husband with arsenic
During the Renaissance, two Italian women started making and selling a potion called “Aqua Tofana.” While it looked like a pretty perfume, it actually contained high levels of arsenic, and they sold it to over 600 women who used it to kill their abusive husbands.
By the 19th century, arsenic had earned the nickname “inheritance powder.” Widely used as rat poison, you could buy it in pharmacies for next to nothing. Since it was tasteless and odorless, it was easy to slip into someone’s food — especially since a woman’s place was in the kitchen.
One woman, Mary Ann Cotton, earned the nickname “The Black Widow” for using arsenic to poison five husbands (and her mother and children).
A cute old Romanian lady, Baba Anujka, created a laboratory in her house after her husband died. There, she brewed “magic water” and “love potions” out of arsenic and herbs, which she sold to married women. Their husbands would drop dead after a week. Meanwhile, Baba lived to 100 years old and likely killed up to 150 people.
Medical historians estimate that arsenic poisoning was responsible for thousands of “natural deaths,” but in 1836, the Marsh test was developed, allowing examiners to detect trace amounts of the poison.
So women switched to other methods
Strychnine: a common pest control remedy of the day. Cyanide: once used in paint, wallpaper, and cosmetics. Opium, which you could easily get from your family doctor. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, is a gorgeous flower you could grow in your own garden.
John Emsley (author of The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison) told Vice, “Poison was really the only weapon that a woman could use.” It was cheap. It was quiet. It didn’t require muscle, weapons, or bloodshed.
But soon, people started to catch on.
Textbooks dedicated huge chapters to the exciting new science of forensic toxicology. The press covered stories about serial poisoners. Women were publicly hanged for their crimes. A panic overtook Europe and the United States, leading to a widespread fear of being poisoned by one's wife.
By the 20th century, toxicology had advanced far enough to detect nearly any household poison — but something else had shifted, too: Women could now initiate divorces with significantly less cost, bureaucracy, and stigma. Suddenly, murder wasn’t the only way out.
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Women use paperwork instead of poison — for now
When trapped in a marriage they no longer want to be in, modern women call their lawyer, not their town chemist.
Today, 90% of homicide suspects are men, and research shows that an overwhelming number of women who kill do so out of self-defense. Feminism no longer requires fatalities, so most women simply walk out the door.
Unfortunately, some politicians want to bring us back to the Victorian era.
Conservative members of the Trump administration have openly opposed no-fault divorce, arguing that it undermines the Christian concept of marriage. Oklahoma Senator Dusty Deevers introduced a bill that promotes “covenant marriages,” which makes divorce significantly more difficult, while Texas lawmakers proposed ending no-fault divorce entirely.
According to an article by the National Organization for Women:
“It is not an over-exaggeration to say that no-fault divorce saves women’s lives. According to CNN, A 2004 paper by economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found an 8 to 16% decrease in female suicides after states enacted no-fault divorce laws. They also noted a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence among both women and men and a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners.”
And judging by history’s countless cases of arsenic-laced teacups, nightshade tonics, and rat-poison stew, no-fault divorce saves men’s lives, too.
Maria Cassano is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has appeared on NBC, Bustle, CNN, The Daily Beast, Food & Wine, and Allure, among others. She's in the process of publishing her memoir, which you can learn more about here.
