Ott v. Ott

Late one cold and windy December night in 1858, Madison physician Dr. Anna B. Ott sought refuge at the home of a neighbor. Per Ott’s later divorce filings, her husband George V. Ott, a tanner and harness maker, had “forcibly expelled” his wife of two and a half years and her twelve-year-old daughter, Aurelia (a child from Ott’s first marriage), from their beautiful new home on the shores of Lake Monona and locked the doors against their reentry.¹ According to court documents, the unnamed neighboring household, likely woken by pounding knocks and loud voices, sheltered Anna and Aurelia “for about ten or twelve days.”²

The tumultuous, prolonged, and multi-effort divorce records of Anna and George V. Ott are difficult to read. They document relational violence and starkly reveal the limited legal, financial, and community options available to a nineteenth-century woman who sought to leave her marriage—and in this case, specifically, the dismal options open even to a relatively privileged, property-owning, and moneyed professional white woman. This case illustrates how household violence and divorce played out in the relatively new state of Wisconsin, granted statehood in 1848. These records also document the ways that medical diagnoses rendered women vulnerable, no matter what relative privilege some may have held. Finally, the many holes in the records, which easily frustrate a contemporary reader, provide an example of how we might work to understand the past when constrained by limited evidence, as often happens when historians look at the past lives of women.

Assured by George’s promises that “he would ill-treat her no more,” and again per her later court filings, Anna and her daughter returned to their home nearly two weeks after the initial incident. On the day after Christmas, however, George “again commenced to assault” his wife, “and did then and there beat, kick, and otherwise violently abuse and ill-treat” her. That evening, Anna sent for a local alderman “to procure his interference for her protection.” The alderman’s intervention may have helped in the short term, but like the protection of Anna’s neighbor, it had no substantive authority or consequence. The next day, George again beat Anna while she visited his leather goods store. On December 29, according to the divorce suit, he “forcibly and violently assaulted, and beat, bruised, and kicked, and otherwise abused her person.” On the thirtieth, he “seized this plaintiff by the throat and so held and choked her until she became insensible.” Recovering “sufficiently strong to leave the house” by the next day, Anna once again took refuge with the same neighboring family that had sheltered her a few weeks earlier.³ While almost nothing is left behind of Anna’s words, her actions indicate her refusal to accept George’s violence.

Anna’s strategy of seeking informal assistance from neighbors and local officials was not unique. In the mid-nineteenth century, long before twentieth-century feminist activism resulted in the naming and prosecution of domestic violence, no legal protections existed for women like her.⁴ In this period, as historian Thomas Buckley writes, “the first acceptable refuge of many battered women was with a father who could extend male protection,” but Anna had no family nearby. She turned to the next commonly used resource: neighbors.⁵ Historian Robin Sager has shown that “Wisconsin community members regularly engaged in these types of interventions” for neighboring women facing household violence in the late 1840s and 1850s.⁶ According to Sager’s comparative study of domestic violence in antebellum America, marital violence was “elevated and ferocious” in the new state of Wisconsin compared to regions in which European immigrants and native-born white settlers were more firmly established. Linking the violent treatment of wives to the “frontier” society of the young state, she suggests that “Wisconsin men took their cues from the violence that they witnessed in their communities and perpetrated physical marital cruelties as part of a quest to reinforce their authority as the head of a household.” Applying this further, it is possible to see the violence of the conquest of Indigenous communities leaking into settler culture, households, and relationships.⁷

Historical evidence on Anna’s