A Leashed Wife, For Selling
ErosBlog has a recent post about the quaint practice of holding public wife auctions in Merrie Olde England. Apparently it was mostly about getting around restrictions on divorce, with a side order of being totally fed up with each other’s spousal bullshit. Usually wife selling was mutual and consensual and the “buyer” prearranged, but the ritual was that of a full-fledged public auction, with the leashed wife paraded about on public view like livestock, her virtues (and faults) extolled, and open bidding entertained with much public merriment:
Elsewhere on Bondage Blog:
[…] her neck is from a two-page wife-selling spread in the June 1948 issue of Cavalcade magazine. Wife selling as a sort of informal divorce is a genuine historical practice, although this account in an ancient […]