Editing Divorce (section)

=== Early America ===
In colonial America, marriage was understood to be for the purpose of reproductive and economic success. Divorce was granted if either party was proven to have deceived the other about their financial or reproductive status.<ref name=":7">{{Cite book |last=Reis |first=Elizabeth |title=Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex |publisher=Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press |year=2009 |isbn=978-1421441849 |pages=8–10 |language=en}}</ref>

[[Impotence]] as grounds for divorce required physical examination of the husband. Women with malformed genitalia would also be examined by a midwife to determine if the malformation was responsible for infertility.<ref name=":7" />

In the [[antebellum South]], courts were reluctant to divorce white couples. Wives were the most likely to ask for divorce, however husbands were more likely to receive one. Successful divorces initiated by husbands were often in response to the wife's infidelity with a black man. A landmark court case in 1825 set the precedent of prioritizing the raising of white children over the wife's adultery.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hodes |first=Martha |title=White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-century South |publisher=New Haven, CT: Yale University Press |year=1997 |isbn=0300069707 |pages=68–71 |language=en}}</ref>

In the 1860s, marriage law changed rapidly as the definition of [[miscegenation]] was altered to account for more and different racial categories. This sometimes forced the annulment of [[Interracial marriage|mixed-race marriages]].<ref>{{Cite book |last=Pascoe |first=Peggy |title=What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America |publisher=New York: Oxford University Press |year=2010 |isbn=9780199772353 |pages=77–93 |language=en}}</ref>