So you mean they were treated as chattels almost, then?

Yeah, absolutely.

And that's partly just the legal system wasn't designed for anything more than that.

The legal system was all about assigning property to one person or another, so children just had to sort of be part of that.

And then there was a very gradual erosion of that principle, and my book is told through the history of, of six families, mainly six women, who had sort of instrumental custody battles of one, one kind or another.

And the first chapter is about a woman called Caroline Norton, who discovered that her husband owned her children way too [laughs] late in her marriage.

She'd always been a very emancipated woman.

[laughs]