Note 188 — Chapter XVII · A CENTURY AND A QUARTER OF DIVORCE LEGISLATION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1776-1903

As early as 1800 separate maintenance is secured to the wife in certain cases. It is enacted "that any court of quarter sessions or district court, shall be vested with jurisdiction to hear and determine applications from wives against their husbands for alimony, in cases where the husband has, or may hereafter desert or abandon his wife for the space of one year successively, or where he lives in open avowed adultery with another woman for the space of six months, and in cases of cruel, inhuman, and barbarous treatment."—Digest of the Stat. Laws of Ky. (1834), I, 121. Such cruel treatment warrants alimony even when life is not endangered: 2 J. J. Marshall, 324; but not divorce: ibid., 322.

"Before the passage of the above act, the chancellor had power to grant alimony, and since the statute it may be decreed in cases not embraced by it."—Digest (1834), I, 121, note. "After a decree for alimony, the power of the husband over the wife shall cease;" and she may use such alimony, and acquire and dispose of any property, "without being subject to the control, molestation, or hindrance" of the husband, as if she were a feme sole: ibid., I, 122. The two kinds of common-law divorce, in canonical sense, were originally recognized in Kentucky: Humphrey, Compendium of the Common Law in Force in Ky. (1822), 135.