Joanna C. Colcord

“ A desire for support, or for a resumption of sex relations, may play a part in a wife's decision to forgive the wanderer. There are many other factors—use and wont; pride in being able to show a good front to the neighbors; a feeling that it is unnatural to be receiving support from other sources. Just the mere desire to have his clothes hanging on the wall and the smell of his pipe about, the hundreds of small details that go to make up the habit of living together, have each their separate pull on the woman whose instinct to be wife and mother to her erring man is urging her to give in ”

“ It has frequently been said that desertion is the poor man's divorce but, like many epigrams, this one hardly stands the test of experience. When examined closely it is neither illuminating nor, if the testimony of social case workers can be accepted, is it true. It is true, of course, that many of the causes of domestic infelicity which lead to divorce among the well-to-do may bring about desertion among the less fortunate, but the deserting man does not, as a rule, consider his absences from home as anything so final and definite as divorce. ”

“ In New York state there is no law which covers the case of a man who abandons his wife while she is pregnant, if there is no other living child. To constitute an extraditable crime there must have been abandonment of a child in esse not merely in posse.
But no institution, however carefully established by law, is any more effective than the people who run it; and the usefulness of the domestic relations court in any community depends entirely upon the social-mindedness and freedom from political entanglement of the judge and the amount and quality of probation service. ”

“ These are only a few of the questions to which the social worker needs to know the answer, if the decision is to be a wise one.
If none of the elements is present in the home out of which family life can be reconstructed, if the man's self-indulgence and cruelty have been proved beyond any doubt, or if affection is dead or never existed, then the decision may have to be that no reconciliation be attempted. In many cases the question then is how best to protect the woman and children against the man's forcing his way upon them. ”

“ In the minds of both man and woman there is likely to be found a superstructure of suspicion, jealousy, misinterpretation and distrust, built upon the basic fact of their incompatibility, which has to be pulled down before the true causes can be probed. To arrest a man in this state of mind is in his eyes simply to "take sides" against him. Eventually he may have to be arrested, but, in the case worker's experience, the chances of success are ten to one if the man can be induced to take some voluntary step toward reconciliation without the intervention of the law. ”

“ The particular problem involved in the treatment of the family during the trial and imprisonment of the deserter is that of encouraging the woman to stick to her guns. If she withdraws her complaint or secures his release before his time is up, she not only convinces him of her lack of firmness but the entry in the court record seriously prejudices her case should she make complaint there again. Unless the social worker is convinced, therefore, that the sentence has been unduly severe, the wife should be encouraged in every way to let her husband serve out his time. ”

“ Many volumes have been written upon the history of marriage, or rather of the family, since, as one historian justly puts it, "marriage has its source in the family rather than the family in marriage." [2] In all these studies the influence of law, of custom, of self-interest, and of economic pressure, is shown to have molded the institution of marriage into curious shapes and forms, some grievous to be borne. ”

“ When social workers use such methods it should be in the full realization that they are foregoing any future advantage of straight dealing with the man. To capture a man by a trick is to declare war on him; and, in his mind, the social worker and the policeman then stand in the same place, "I'd have him there to meet you," said a deserter's chum to a woman visitor, "if I wasn't sure, in spite of your straight talk, you'd have a bull waiting behind a tree." ”

“ The man's return to the family is often the critical point at which there is need of skilful and sympathetic friendship. These cases cry out for continued treatment. We need to think more humanely about all the unsettling elements in our urban civilization and to see that all the nice individual adjustments that as case workers we can make are made. If the man's work gives him no opportunity for self-expression, what attempt are we making to give him such opportunities outside his work, to connect him with a trade union, with clubs and with fraternities? ”

“ Corresponding to and complementing the man's industrial defects, and springing from the same causes, is the woman's failure in the business of being a housewife. The wife's laziness, incompetence, lack of interest, and lack of skill and knowledge create, as one case worker puts it, "the sort of home that tends to get itself deserted." These faults of the wife are responsible for as many desertions, probably, as are the faults of the husband. When the man and the wife are both industrial failures we get the extremity of family breakdown to be found in records of "chronic non-support" cases. ”

“ It should be said that this plan has never received a fair trial on a large scale, for legal equipment has always lagged behind knowledge. It may be true that just as a community can, within limits, regulate its death rate by what it is willing to pay, so it can by repressive measures regulate its desertion rate. But measures that keep the would-be deserter in the home which constantly grows less of a home, simply through fear of consequences if he left it, seem hardly a desirable form of prevention from the social point of view. ”

“ To the children it is likely to give more protection than divorce; for in the event of the divorced husband's remarriage the children of the second wife have prior rights over those of the first, and legal separation makes this impossible by preventing the remarriage of either party. Proceedings for a legal separation cannot usually be started if a man is on probation, but may be while he is undergoing imprisonment. It should be said that, after a separation, claims for non-payment of alimony cannot, in many states, be pressed in a court of domestic relations but must go to a civil court. ”

“ A man volunteer can search for a deserter in places where a woman, by being conspicuous, would defeat her own end. "Located man by mingling with longshoremen on the docks where he usually worked" could hardly be the entry of a woman visitor. A man can also be very useful in court cases, to counteract the prejudice that sometimes exists in court rooms against the testimony of social workers who are women. In the more subtle processes of winning the man's confidence and helping him to regenerate his life and recover his home there is no preponderance of testimony in favor of the man visitor. ”

“ The social worker who attempts to deal with the situation the deserter creates should know this attitude in advance and be prepared, through some simple rule-of-thumb psychology, to attack the obsession and bring him, first of all, to see and face squarely his own responsibility.
Many blanket theories have been developed to explain desertion—that it is due to economic pressure; that it is the result of bad housekeeping; that its causes can all be reduced to sex incompatibility. ”

“ When it is established that the marriage is a common law union, a strong suspicion should be set up in the worker's mind that there may be some legal barrier to a ceremony, and careful inquiry should be directed along this line. Not only does the verification of a marriage give the worker a sound basis on which to proceed to court action if necessary, but the copy of the actual marriage record, where that can be procured, gives much valuable information as to dates, addresses, and names of relatives and witnesses. ”

“ The social worker can sometimes slip some of the burden of the decision off the woman's shoulders to her own by exacting a promise from the two that they will not try living together until the man has "shown what he can do" for a certain definite time. The economic pressure can be eased by a wise policy of relief; but most of all such a woman needs continued encouragement from a person whose judgment and kindliness she has learned to trust. ”

“ Most social workers feel a subconscious sense of injustice in having to do this work at all, since it is properly a function of the police. Prosecutors and police officials generally take very little interest in following up deserters, and have little idea of giving any treatment to the deserter who has been found other than arraignment and conviction. It is difficult for the probation officer or the family case worker to hold up the machinery of the law, once it has been started, and to do this long enough to find out whether some other form of treatment best suits the case. ”

“ The permanence of family life is one of the foundation stones of their professional faith; yet they may fail to recognize certain manifestations of this permanence as part and parcel of the end for which they are striving. They would see no point in the practice adopted by a certain social agency which deals with many cases of family desertion. This society, when it has had occasion to print copies of a deserter's photograph to use in seeking to discover his present whereabouts, often presents his wife with an enlargement of the picture suitable for framing. ”

“ If it is hoped or expected that the man will return to his home after imprisonment, he should be earnestly cultivated by the social worker while he is serving his time. Visits and letters will go far toward breaking down his resentment at the part the worker is likely to have played in "putting him behind the bars." Now is an excellent time to introduce a man as volunteer visitor to the prisoner, if he is to be off probation when released. ”

“ On questions of investigation there is closer agreement among social workers than on questions of treatment. Personal factors here play a much larger part, and it may very well be that two case workers who differ in personality but are of equal ability, will choose very different plans of treatment in a given case and yet each bring it to a successful issue. It is with a good deal of hesitancy, therefore, that a case worker ventures upon the discussion of anything so flexible as treatment. ”

“ And for yet other reasons it is well to keep a watchful eye upon the neighborhood in which the family is living for reports about the man. Often obscure impulses seem to bring him back; jealousy of the wife or a desire to show himself in a spirit of bravado, or even sometimes a fugitive affection for the children he has abandoned may cause him to appear in the neighborhood. "The deserter, like the murderer, harks back to the scene of his misdeeds" was the generalization of one district secretary. ”

“ If a policy of relief has been necessary, care should be taken that it be adequate, so that economic pressure will not induce her to ask for his release. If the home has been broken up and the children committed, the mother's loneliness and desire to have her home back is likely to work in the same way. The hope of making her husband kinder when he returns often leads a woman to ask for his release. The pressure of relatives and friends, and sometimes of her church is likely to be exerted in the same direction and unknown to the social worker. ”

“ It is possible that, beset by irritations and perplexities, the thought of cutting his way out at one stroke from all his difficulties made an appeal too strong to be resisted. Or perhaps he flung out of the house and away, in a passion of anger and jealousy which later crystallized into cold dislike. The spell of an infatuation for another woman might well have been the cause ”