The Great Divorce

“Ilyon Woo presents the earliest child custody laws of this country with vivid relevance . . . both legal and feminist details are fascinating.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch The Great Divorce is the dramatic, richly textured story of one of nineteenth-century America’s most infamous divorce cases, in which a young mother single-handedly challenged her country’s notions of women’s rights, family, and marriage itself. In 1814, Eunice Chapman came home to discover that her three children had been carr