DO YOU HAVE A PRE-MISTRESSING FINANCIAL AGREEMENT?

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a pre-mistressing verbal agreement witnessed in Paris by her brother.  Pregnant in Paris, where she and her brother who were there with Jefferson could have walked away and lived in freedom from slavery, he promised the teenager that if she came back with him to the United States - Virginia - Monticello - that he would free their children once they became adults - and he did.  At that time, in my opinion, Sally was both vulnerable and at the height of her negotiating power.  (I believe modern women are generally at the height of their negotiating power with a man before they move in with him and I think a Mistress should keep her own residence.) But his willingness to make this deal communicated that he saw them having a future together and that she trusted him.


There is such a thing as a pre-nup, and there has been among the wealthier people for some time.  For instance, before Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, there were negotiations of how much she could spend a year and how much she would get for each year of marriage should they divorce. Though controversial when he died without completing a divorce from her, Onassis, his lawyers, Ted Kennedy - the brother of her deceased husband President John F. Kennedy, and her lawyers are all rumored, depending on what book about them you read, to have taken part in these negotiations as a legal financial understanding before the wedding.  In some cultures such discussions could be called "bride price" or while a "dowry" is the money that a woman brought into a marriage with her; many poor women without a dowry were unmarriageable.


If you are a Mistress, or contemplating accepting a man's offer to be Kept by him, I strongly suggest you do negotiate, but it feels tacky to many and not romantic.


DO YOU HAVE A PRE-MISTRESSING FINANCIAL AGREEMENT?