This is the BBC.

Welcome to Late Night Women's Hour.

When you talk to your friends, the world seems the right way up again, and that's what we do here.

Every week, we have three brilliant women around the table who straighten things out, the stuff you really need to know.

Here with me are anthropologist Kit Davis, blogger and author Chedera Eggeroo, aka The Slumflower,

and journalist and deputy editor of the new statesman, Helen Lewis.

Hello. Hello. Hi. Okay, Helen, I want to start with a story that you would like to talk about.

The case of Tini Owens, who has to remain married to her husband until 2020.

Right, so I'm researching a book at the moment, which is a history of feminism in nine fights.

I won't go through them for now. But one of them is the right to divorce and it is in some ways the most important because it's about your right to be a full independent person under the law, like a full legal entity. And the history of women's position in British society is of being kind of chattels you pass from your father's household or your elder brothers into being the kind of care of your husband.

Until the Married Women's Property Act in the late 1880s, you didn't have any legal existence at all, right?

You could own your jewellery, I think, if you had jewelry, maybe.

That was why it was always in historical portraiture.

Oh, right, okay.

Well, portable goods are very important to women for all kinds of reasons.

But, and then there was a famous divorce case of Caroline Norton, whose husband appears to have been so awful that basically everyone seems to been on her side.

And gradually through things like that, we got divorce law reform. But one of the things that we have, so you no longer have to have an act of parliament to get divorced.

Big relief for everyone concerned, that one.

But one of the things that has remained is this archaic idea of fault in divorce.

So there are five grounds in which you can get divorced in Britain.

Adultery, desertion, unreasonable behaviour, and then separation in two kinds,

one of which is if you both agree that you just live apart for two years and then that's

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