Divorce

“ If the slight formalities that are the bulwarks of love as well as friendship, many forbearances, and more of the small, sweet courtesies of life, were but permitted to blossom forth like unexpected flowers beneath the family rooftree, fewer unhappy marriages would catalogue their miseries in the divorce court. ”

“ But you have just told me, my child, that you are seeking a divorce from your husband because you are mismated, in order to become as quickly as possible the wife of another man, whom you profess to love. ”

“ Divorce, in its fullest interpretation;—divorce, which breaks the marriage utterly, and allows of a new choice; the children of which new choice shall be as legitimate and as capable of inheriting by succession, as the children of any other marriages,—is the established law of our land. ”

“ A henpecked husband imagines he has escaped by divorce from the clutches of his wife and his mother-in-law. He marries again, when, lo and behold, the double combination of marriage and divorce brings back to him his former wife in the aggravated form of a second mother-in-law! ”

“ Effects of Divorce.—The judgment of divorce completely sets aside the marriage, and both parties are free to marry again. On divorce the innocent party also comes into the immediate enjoyment of all the rights in the estate of the guilty spouse, or the funds settled by the marriage contract, as if the offending party had died at the date of the decree. ”

“ If there are few examples of divorce, it shows how little divorce need be dreaded; if there are many, it shows how much it is required. The rarity of divorce is an argument in favour of divorce; and the multiplicity of divorce is an argument against marriage. ”

“ But yet to say, divorce was granted for relief of wives, rather then of husbands, is but weakly conjectur'd, and is manifest the extreme shift of a huddled exposition. Whenas it could not be found how hardnesse of heart should be lessn'd by liberty of divorce, a fancy was devis'd to hide the flaw, by commenting that divorce was permitted only for the help of wives. Palpably uxorious! Who can be ignorant that woman was created for man, and not man for woman; and that a husband may be injur'd as insufferably in mariage as a wife. ”

“ But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions and indissoluble bonds—indissoluble, except through the loathsome medium of the divorce court—was a condition of life that his whole nature shrank from. ”

“ The conditions under which, in different communities, divorce has at different times been permitted, vary with the aspects in which the relation of marriage (q.v.) has been regarded. When marriage has been deemed to be the acquisition by the husband of property in the wife, or when it has been regarded as a mere agreement between persons capable both to form and to dissolve that contract, we find that marriage has been dissoluble at the will of the husband, or by agreement of the husband and wife. ”

“ I have heard of one gentleman, who having lived in a state of domestic jarring with his wife, got her persuaded to concur with him in applying for a divorce.—This was soon obtained.—He then married another woman, with whom he was violently in love, and expected, as usual, eternal happiness. ”

“ The husband may in a moment of displeasure simply utter the formula of divorce, and his wife ceases absolutely to belong to him. No particular disgrace attaches to the divorced wife, who easily finds a place in the harîm of another. ”

“ If they be right—and I suspect they are—we have made a famous blunder by our late legislation about divorce. Of all the crafts that ever were launched, marriage is one from which fewest facilities of desertion should be provided. ”

“ A limited divorce, or a total divorce in the discretion of the court, may be granted to the wife (1) when the husband is guilty of cruel and inhuman treatment; or (2) of such conduct as renders it unsafe and improper for her to cohabit with him and be under his dominion and control; (3) when he has offered such indignities to her person as to render her condition intolerable and thereby forced her to withdraw; (4) when he has abandoned her; or (5) turned her out of doors and refused or neglected to provide for her support. ”

“ Seven causes for justifiable divorce are laid down in the classics of Confucius, which are the basis of legal morals in Japan as in China, or as those of Justinian are with us. The wife may be divorced:
1. If she be disobedient to her parents-in-law. (After marriage, in her husband's home, his parents become hers in a far more significant sense than among us.)
2. If she be barren. (If the husband loves his childless wife, he keeps and supports her.) ”

“ Where a woman claims divorce, the husband is adjudged to afford her a maintenance suitable to his wealth; when a man seeks divorce, the wife’s paramour is condemned to pay damages according to the discretion of the court. ”

“ If a man pronounces three divorces upon a wife who is free, or two upon a slave, she is not lawful to him until she shall have been regularly espoused by another man, who having duly consummated the marriage, afterwards divorces her, or dies, and her ’iddah from him be accomplished. ”

“ If a husband comes home to find dinner not cooked, and speaks angrily, his wife [Pg 235] will rush to us in tears for a divorce. If he speaks to another woman and smiles, if he does not give his wife a new dress, if he be fond of going out in the evenings, all these are reasons for a breathless demand for a divorce. The wives get cross and run to us and cry, "My husband has been angry with me. ”

“ The act of 1849 authorizes a divorce to the man when the woman at the time of the marriage, or when it was solemnized, was pregnant by another person without the intended husband's knowledge; and to the wife, when the man prior to the marriage or its solemnization had been convicted of a felony or infamous crime without the woman's knowing it when the marriage took place. ”

“ Since the days of King Henry, divorce has remained an indulgence sacred to the aristocracy of England. The poorer classes have no form of divorce amongst them. Marriage is for them,—as I have said,—practically, a sacrament.
The rich man makes a new marriage, having divorced his wife in the House of Lords: his new marriage is legal; his children are legitimate ”

“ READER. During the proceedings for divorce, the wife should be as free as the husband. The child that should be born to her after more than ten months' separation should be reputed natural, even though the divorce had not been pronounced ”

“ The present facility of divorce encourages thoughtless and unsuitable marriages in the first place; and in the second place, encourages the resort to divorce in circumstances of family disturbance which would speedily right themselves in the present as they have done in the past if those concerned knew that their happiness and comfort for years compelled an adjustment of life. ”

“ The greatest care should be taken to avoid divorce, for, though divorce is permitted, yet God disapproves of it, because the very utterance of the word "divorce" causes a woman pain, and how can it be right to pain any one? When divorce is absolutely necessary, the formula for it should not be repeated, thrice all at once, but on three different occasions. ”

“ James’s Gazette, dealing with the subject of the Divorce Laws, calmly proposes that in any revision of the code, which he strongly advocates, “women should be placed on the same footing with men.” Such a pestilent heresy of course provoked correspondence, and, as I have made a careful study of the subject, I beg to submit to you, sir, a few reasonable grounds for divorce, which this reformer will, I hope, include in his precious revised code.
A man should be allowed to obtain a divorce from his wife on all or any of the following grounds:—
1. If he sees anyone he likes better than his wife. ”

“ Husbands and wives appear to pass their lives very [56] agreeably together, which may partly be caused by the facility of divorce. Many men and women have been married seven or eight times before they find the partner with whom they desire to spend the rest of their lives. I saw a young girl of seventeen who had already had three husbands. These divorces take place at varied times, from a few days after marriage, to one or two years. However, after the birth of a child, they seldom seek to separate, and if they do the husband is fined, but not the wife. ”

“ The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History is full of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce without seeming to. Sometimes they would illegitimize two or three generations in order to find a marriage within the forbidden degrees.
“According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce on the ground of adultery; according to Mark and Luke he made no such allowance. New York State follows Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows Luke and John. Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none of the Church's business. ”

“ Paragraph 3- If one divorces his wife because she developed a bad reputation or because she takes vows often or is incapable of having children, he may not remarry her. There are those who say this is only where he specifically said that is why he is divorcing her and he doubles his statement and says if not for these circumstances he would not divorce her. ”

“ An English woman in Newport told me the other day that a wife cannot obtain a divorce from her husband unless infidelity be coupled with cruel and abusive treatment, though the contrary is true in case of a man. A husband can have his affairs, provided he does not make them public or beat his wife, but she must toe the mark. ”

“ Among the most frequent causes of divorce are desire for change in the husband, venereal diseases, disputes, incompatibility of temper, mental disorders, immorality, ill-treatment and crime. The sterility of one of the conjoints and incapacity for coitus may also be mentioned as reasons for divorce, although in certain circumstances, as we shall see, limited polyandry or polygyny may be much more humane than divorce. ”

“ Effects of Divorce.—Parties who have been divorced cannot become husband and wife again if either of them, after the divorce, have contracted a new marriage since the divorce and been divorced a second time. ”

“ As under the Mosaic law, these causes were invented only for the advantage of the husband. A wife had no right even to desire a divorce from her husband.
An examination of the seven causes shows that a woman could be divorced practically at her husband’s pleasure. The New Civil Code has changed all this. A wife has equal rights with her husband to the benefits of the divorce law. ”

“ Thus surely we ought each one of us to ask himself or herself to look ahead, and try to imagine what would be the result to our nation of relaxing the severity of the present divorce law—or of increasing it. ”

“ The system of divorce is, we may say, the device of society for remedying the inherent defects of the betrothal system. It treats both the man and the woman as though they were not persons but unfeeling machines. Personality, for a while submissive, soon asserts its liberty, in case the married parties prove uncongenial, and demands the right of divorce. ”

“ By some it is positively asserted that divorce is not permitted under any circumstances; that the husband and wife may separate on the ground of incompatibility of temper or for misconduct; and that in these circumstances the husband is at liberty to marry again, while the wife is not. ”

“ Some husbands and wives fight like cats and dogs, but in spite of it all, thank God, they still dearly love their children. What man or woman within the pale of decency would give a daughter in marriage with the thought that she might be put away by her husband at some time for some cause recognized by the courts of Utah, or Chicago, or Indiana, as sufficient for divorce? ”

“ On the contrary, there seems cause for wonder, not that there are so many divorces, but that there are so many happy marriages, with wives and husbands devoted and faithful. For a nobleman in the olden times to divorce his wife would have caused such a scandal and talk that it rarely occurred. ”

“ Seeing that the compact of marriage is not done away by divorce intervening; so that they continue wedded persons one to another, even after separation; and commit adultery with those, with whom they shall be joined, even after their own divorce, either the woman with a man, or the man with a woman. ”

“ Unfortunately, a divorce can be obtained by the husband for a trivial cause by the payment of a small fee. A native, on being asked why he got a divorce from his wife, replied, "She ate too much and I could not afford to keep her." ”

“ Less strictly, divorce is commonly understood to include judicial declarations of nullity of marriage, which, while practically terminating the marriage relation, proceed in law on the basis of the marriage never having been legally established. ”

“ The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Restored to the good of both Sexes from the Bondage of Canon Law and other Mistakes was the title of a pamphlet put forth by him in August 1643, without his name, but with no effort at concealment, declaring the notion of a sacramental sanctity in the marriage relation to be a clerically invented superstition, and arguing that inherent incompatibility of character, or contrariety of mind, between two married persons is a perfectly just reason for divorce. ”

“ To those who, on the other hand, object to facility of divorce being granted at all, it may fairly be asked that they should not forget that to place divorce within the reach of people, is not the same as compelling them to submit to it. ”

“ The modern Catholic says: "Man must not separate what God has united." Among many savages, on the contrary, divorce is left to the free will of the married couple. Elsewhere it is sometimes the man, sometimes both husband and wife who have the right to exact divorce for divers reasons, such as drunkenness, adultery, prodigality, etc. In Europe, as elsewhere, it is the desire for change which is the most common cause of divorce. ”