Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law

The Australia Studies Institute is hosting Associate Professor Alecia Simmonds to deliver the 2025 Reese Memorial Lecture on her book 'Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law'.

The Reese Memorial Lecture is given in honour of Dr Trevor Reese, a distinguished historian of the British Commonwealth and Australia and Reader at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Institute’s home from 1982 to 1999. The lecture is given by an emerging scholar in the disciplines of history or political science.

About the event

Between 1806 and 1975 nearly a thousand people in Australia, almost all women, sued their partners for jilting them, or in legal terminology, for breach of promise of marriage. Litigants came to court with their love letters, gifts, lost wages, gossiping neighbours, expert witnesses, trousseaux, jewellery and tales of blasted affection seeking financial compensation for the injuries suffered in consequence of a broken engagement. Anglophone historians have analysed these cases to reveal how the law translated gender-specific norms into legally binding rules and to illuminate the economic foundations of romantic love. Yet although the action continued into the twentieth century, historical narratives end with the Victorian era. As British historian Claire Langhamer has argued, ‘by the twentieth century breach of promise was widely viewed as a legal action out of step with modern intimacies.’

But in Alecia's own study the twentieth century is when the action springs to life. From 1900-1930, 523 cases of breach of promise were reported in the national newspapers, compared with 211 in the entire 19th century. Not only were there more cases being reported, the cases themselves appeared in a radically altered form. As courtship ceased to be policed by family and kin or bound by the formalities of the Victorian era, the Courts became a site where the new codes of love and proof of loss could be tested and debated. Engagement rings and commodities became invested with legal meanings, women went to hospital suffering from heartbreak and doctors offered expert testimony about the physical effects of love.

Beginning with an overview of how the action operated as a form of welfare and maintenance payment for single mothers in the nineteenth century, this talk will then move to examine the peculiar twentieth century dimensions of the action: how vernacular understandings of romantic objects came to have official legal status and how medical and psychiatric knowledge intersected with law’s epistemology, or how law knows what it thinks it knows.

About the author

Professor Alecia Simmonds

Alecia Simmonds works at the interface of legal history, feminist history, the history of the emotions, Australian cultural history, Pacific history, and imperial history. She draws upon legal archives, family papers, feminist philosophy, material culture and literature to write feminist biographies and histories of Australia across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that are transnational in scope and methodologically and theoretically inter-disciplinary. Her most recent book, Courting: An Intimate History of

Love and Law (2023) won the 2024 NSW Premier’s Prize for best book in Australian History, the Australian Legal Research Awards for best book, the biennial Hancock Prize for best book in Australian history, and the Australian and New Zealand Legal History Prize for best book. Her previous book Wild Man: A True Story of a Police Killing, Mental Illness and the Law won the Davitt Prize for best Crime Non-Fiction. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Grant Gender, Juries and Citizenship: Women’s Century of Struggle and is an editor of History Australia. Simmonds also contributes frequently to public debate, as seen in her podcasts, radio interviews, book reviews, opinion columns, books, and food history.