Among the many wives-have-their-rights individuals who paid us personal calls was one who waddled in at the lunch-hour, when Miss Sneezet and I chanced to be the only ones in the department. She was short, plump, and wore expensive clothes. She had come to find out what she could do about her husband, she explained to Miss Sneezet. He’d been drafted, and she wanted to make sure that he would pay her the alimony awarded her by the courts.
Miss Sneezet reminded her that the government made certain provisions for dependent wives. Oh, yes, she knew about that, this woman replied, but it was such a small amount. The courts had allowed her thirty dollars a week alimony; if the government took her husband away it should not only make good that amount, but should see that she got her husband’s insurance. Suppose he got killed, then her alimony would stop entirely. Yes, it was only right that the government should make it up to her and guaranty her against loss. A wife had some rights, and she wanted hers.
“Perhaps your husband had his insurance made payable to his children,” Miss Sneezet suggested.
“Children!” the woman cried, her eyes round with surprise. “He ain’t got no children. I never had none, and he ain’t never married again.”
“Suppose you give me your name,” Miss Sneezet finally suggested, as a means of getting rid of her. When the name was given Miss Sneezet glanced up from her writing-pad and her eyes were round with astonishment. “Mrs. John Tooler! But—but you gave your husband’s name as Henry Madden.”
“Well, you see he ain’t exactly my husband, not now. He used to be, but I divorced him before I married John,” the woman explained, and she was not the least bit abashed.
When one considers there is no reason why she should have felt abashed. Such cases are so common that the woman not only continues to demand her pound of flesh after remarriage, but should the earnings of the first man materially increase, she goes to court and asks for a larger share. Nine cases out of ten she gets it. And why shouldn’t she? Having gone through the marriage ceremony not only prevents her from being classed with her twin sister, the woman of the street, but secures for her a share of any worldly goods that may come into the possession of the man until death them do part. If death should part them?—there she stands, next in order after the undertaker and the doctor, demanding her dower rights. Wives have rights!
Having stood the strain—reading the papers of draft-evaders and listening to the stories of the daughters of a horse-leech—until I longed to get off the earth, I asked to be transferred to the filing department. There my boss was an ex-milliner.
“I had a good little business,” she confided to me one day at lunch. “Five girls workin’ for me, and a boy to deliver. The war wiped me out.” She paused, picked at her paper napkin with her fork, then went on. “If I’d only known enough to stop when trade first begun to fall off!” She paused again, this time staring at me in a sort of breathless amazement. “I even used mother’s burial money—payin’ off my girls. She made me take it—we was both so sure the war would soon be over.”
“You’re replacing it now,” I suggested, trying to make my tone consoling—in the tenements for a child to use a parent’s burial fund is a mortal sin.