Forced marriage

“ The undoubted iniquity of our existing marriage laws is always spoken of as an injustice to the woman and the changes in the direction of greater freedom which are advocated as a relief to the wife bound to a bad or otherwise unendurable husband. ”

“ You know how inadequate are the marriage laws to women. You must know, Sir, as I have found out in my experience of public life, how abominable, atrocious, and unjust are the divorce laws as they affect women. You know very well that the married woman has no legal right to the guardianship of her children. Then, too, the illegitimacy laws; you know that a woman sometimes commits the dreadful crime of infanticide, while her partner, the man, who should share her punishment, gets off scot free. ”

“ Briefly the "divorce" evil arises first from the rebellion of woman against marital drunkenness, unfaithfulness, neglect, brutality that a former generation of wives tolerated and even expected. Second, it arises from a conflict between the institution of marriage which still carries with it the chattel idea—that woman is property—and a generation of women that does not accept this. Third, it arises from the ill-balanced demands of women to be treated as equals and also as irresponsible, petty, and indulged tyrants. ”

“ Resolved, That the fundamental error of the whole structure of legislation and custom, whereby women are practically sustained, even in this republic, is the preposterous fiction of law, that in the eye of the law the husband and [Pg 594] wife are one person, that person being the husband; that this falsehood itself, the deposit of barbarism, tends perpetually to brutalize the marriage relation by subjecting wives as irresponsible tools to the capricious authority of husbands ”

“ Whatever abuses free divorce may involve, they cannot often be worse than those which marriage has produced and still produces—marriage, which is degraded to the coarsest sexual habits, the most shameless traffic, the most agonising soul-murders, the most inhuman cruelties, and the grossest infringements of liberty that any department of modern life can show. ”

“ As if sons did not follow the condition of the mothers—as if daughters had no claim to the birthright of the fathers—they established for disfranchised woman a "dead line," by retaining the English common law of marriage, which, unlike that of less liberal European governments, converts the marriage altar into an executioner's block and recognizes woman as a wife only when so denuded of personal rights that in legal phrase she is said to be—"dead in law"! ”

“ But there are other ways of dissolving a marriage; and under some conditions the woman has a chance. Exchange of wives, when [230] both are childless, is "permitted only after the death of their parents, and, of course, with the consent of the chiefs." A couple without children may separate by mutual consent; and "when a woman is treated with cruelty by her husband, she may put herself under the protection of another man, with the intention of becoming his wife. ”

“ Our time has displaced the ancient division of labour, by which the wife cared for the children and the husband provided maintenance. But the law of marriage dates from a time when this division held full sway and when it was, therefore, almost impossible for a woman to receive protection for herself and her child otherwise than in matrimony. Now society has begun to provide such protection for unmarried mothers, and the renunciation of liberty by which the wife purchases the protection of marriage is seen to be not only more and more unworthy, but also unnecessary. ”

“ And her school-girl creed––Love and Service! Fine. Only there’s a prior law––self-preservation; and another––race preservation! By God, how are you going to love and serve if girls stop having babies?
“And as for this silly condemnation of the marriage ceremony, merely because some sanctified Uncle Foozle once inserted the word ‘obey’ in it––just because, under the marriage laws, tyranny and cruelty have been practised––what callow rot!
“Laws can be changed; divorce made simple and non-scandalous as it should be; all rights safeguarded for the woman ”

“ The Independent, a Protestant religious paper, sneers at all barriers to divorce, Catholic, Protestant, or civil, as “shallow,” and declares that “no matter with what solemn ceremony the twain may have been made one, yet when love departs, then marriage ceases and divorce begins.”
A certain unhappy section of those waifs of womanhood, the advocates of woman's rights, is known as the champion of “free-love,” that is, in plain words, adultery. ”

“ It bade woman stand aside from sacerdotal offices, forbidding her to speak in the church, commanding her to ask her husband at home for all she wished to know, at once repressing all tendency toward her freedom among those who adopted the new religion, and by various decretals taught her defilement through the physical peculiarities of her being. It placed the legality of marriage under priestly control, secured to husbands a right of divorce for causes not freeing the wife, and so far set its ban upon this relation as to hold single women above the wife and mother in holiness. ”

“ Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies; pre-nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty; desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of them are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed at all. This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of one party against the other, a grievance having physical or economic consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond. The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken into account. ”

“ We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to efface itself. Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of womanhood. ”

“ Where there is absolute cruelty, or where there is deliberate desertion, on the husband’s part, I see the use and the reason for Divorce. If the unhappy wife can find an honorable man who will protect her, or an honorable man who will offer her a home, Society and Law, which are responsible for the institution of marriage, are bound to allow a woman outraged under the shelter of their institution to marry again. But, where the husband’s fault is sexual frailty, I say the English law which refuses Divorce on that ground alone is right, and the Scotch law which grants it is wrong. ”

“ The assumption that justice to motherhood and childhood will undermine the institution of marriage implies that marriage as an institution is based on injustice; which is to assume that it is fundamentally unsound. ”

“ Or let us assume that the husband sues for divorce on the plea that his wife does not love him. If she admits the plea, the state must grant the divorce; for love only is the ground of a legal marriage, and where there is no love the relation is merely a concubinage. What reasons could a woman have, indeed, to continue to live with a man whom she confessedly did not love? These reasons could only be of an external character, and the man can not allow himself to be made their tool. ”

“ I [253] believe the divorce movement finds its impetus outside of laws, outside of our institutions, outside of our theology; that it finds its impetus in the rebellion of the human heart against that slavery which binds in the cruelest bonds of the cruelest prostitution human beings who have, by their foolishness, by their want of wisdom, or by the intervention of friends, missed the divine purpose, as well as the civil purpose of marriage. ”

“ If there are no children, the surviving husband or wife takes all the property, real and personal; if there are children, one half. Husband must support family.
DIVORCE: Absolute for bigamy, desertion for one year, adultery, impotency, when wife at time of marriage was pregnant by another than her husband, extreme cruelty, fraudulent contract, habitual drunkenness, gross neglect of duty, conviction and imprisonment for felony subsequent to marriage. ”

“ In this way, for instance, saevitia, or cruelty, was included, as was also refusal of conjugal duty, eventually giving rise to the doctrine of "quasi-desertion." But for this last cause a marriage must not be dissolved except on failure of all prescribed means, however cruel, to induce reconciliation or submission. For it was a natural result of the carnal theory of wedlock that theological dogma and church ordinance alike in effect permitted a brutal husband, through the aid of fine, exile, or imprisonment, to force an unwilling wife to render him her "conjugal duty." ”

“ There is, secondly, the legal standard, for which men and women have not equal rights, but which, in the marriage and divorce laws, accords to woman an inferior position—which takes no cognizance of immorality between unmarried persons unless children result and which, in England as distinguished from Scotland, attaches no penalties to infidelity on the part of a husband. ”

“ There are doubtless many other causes besides infidelity for which the welfare of society and the happiness of individuals require that marriage may be dissolved. "It is a scandal to English legislation," observes [112] Lecky, that divorce "should not be granted when one of the partners has been condemned for some grave criminal offence involving a long period of imprisonment or penal servitude, or for wilful and prolonged desertion, or for cruelty, however atrocious, if it is not coupled with adultery. ”

“ It demands that two human beings should give to each other what they cannot give. And—the essence of marriage being consent—it makes the fact that both parties desire its dissolution the final reason for denying them! To force a woman to demand the "restitution of conjugal rights" when such "rights" have become a horrible wrong; to compel a man to commit, or perjure himself by pretending he has committed, adultery, before he can get the State to face the fact that his marriage is no longer a reality—is this to uphold morality? Is this the ideal of the Sermon on the Mount? ”

“ To the majority of men, however—and this is the more the case the lower they are in other respects—the present marriage law still forms the great hindrance in the way of their development to a higher humanity. To have wife and child in his power makes of the wicked man a torturer, of the low-minded a wretch. ”

“ Meanwhile the semi-divorced wife can obtain no relief, and is compelled to live on, without the freedom of the spinster or the widow, or the social consideration of the married woman. She can only obtain freedom by committing what the law and society brand as adultery ”

“ Thus that marriage should only be lawful with one wife, that it should be for life, that it should be terminable by the infidelity of either husband or wife, are rules of right; not of morality, as such, but of right. Without such rules the rights of the married persons are not maintained. Those outward conditions of family life would not be secured to them, which are necessary on the whole for the development of a free morality. ”

“ If it was wrong on the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. ”

“ Marriage will be held sacred, and no one will be allowed to trifle with the institution.
Then it will no longer be the custom to commit adultery or acts of cruelty in order to obtain a divorce. No couples will be compelled to remain fastened together, living a life of misery. If they find it impossible to live happily and comfortably together, their mutual consent to a divorce will be sufficient to secure their freedom. ”

“ With all the modification of the last quarter, of a century, our English law of marriage still invests the husband with a sovereignty almost despotic over his wife. It secures to him her personal service and savings, and the control and custody of her person as against herself. Having thus reduced the wife to a dead pauper owing service to her husband, our shrewd forefathers, to secure the bond, confiscated her natural obligations as a child and a mother. Whether married or single, only inability excuses a son from the legal support of indigent and infirm parents. ”

“ We know, for example, that to fulfill herself biologically—that is, to give birth to children—a woman must have security, the protection of the male, a permanent abode. Marriage has been society’s answer to this feminine need from time immemorial. But the feminists pitted themselves against the institution of marriage. Woman, they held, had the right, even as men did, to be promiscuous sexually, to live with whom she pleased, for as long or as short a time as she pleased. ”

“ Tendencies.—There can be no question that the present tendency is in the direction of greater freedom in the marriage relation. Society will not continue to sanction inhumanity and immorality in the relations of man to woman. Marriage is ideally a sacred relation, but when it is not so treated, when love is dead and repulsion has taken its place, and especially when physical contact brings disease and suffering, public opinion is likely to consider that marriage is thereby virtually annulled, and to permit ratification of the fact by a decree of divorce. ”