The husband met me at the door, with an honest, unabashed, but distressed face. "Don't deny it to her," said he. "I never committed but one sin, and that was when I kept it from her. She was a sweet, pious creature; and I feared she would not consent."
This man told me that he sent six hundred dollars yearly to his insane wife; that this kept her better than he could afford to keep himself and his family: "but," said he, "her station was always higher than mine."
In the other cases, the men had told their stories, and the wives had consented to the arrangement. It is obvious, that, if a wife wished to withdraw from a husband in this manner, she could not do it, on account of property restrictions, and the common unfitness for self-support.[36]
In the marriage of a minor, the consent of the father, or of a guardian appointed by him, is necessary, but not that of the mother: another indication of the estimate the law puts upon woman, as compared with man; and this estimate, whenever and wherever it shows itself, has the effect to depress every woman's desire to fit herself to be a good citizen; and, when she fails in citizenship, man must fail also, as is ably shown by De Tocqueville.
"A hundred times in the course of my life," he says, "I have seen weak men display public virtue because they had beside them wives who sustained them in this course, not by counselling this or that action in particular, but by exercising a fortifying influence on their views of duty and ambition. Oftener still, I have seen domestic influence operating to transform a man, naturally generous, noble, and unselfish, into a cowardly, vulgar, and ambitious self-seeker, who thought of his country's affairs only to see how they could be turned to his own private comfort or advancement; and this simply by daily contact with an honest woman, a faithful wife, a devoted mother, from whose mind the grand notion of public duty was entirely absent."[37]
A man and wife are one person in law: a wife loses all her rights as a single woman. Her husband is legally responsible for her acts: so she is said to live under his cover. A woman's body belongs to her husband. She is in his custody, and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus.
This last is one of the points in which the public feeling is so far before the law, that the latter could never be wholly enforced.
If a woman were unlawfully restrained of her liberty, her husband might take advantage of a habeas corpus to get possession of her; but it is not probable that any court, in England or this country, would now grant one to compel a wife to live with her husband against her will. Still, the estimate of the marriage relation which such laws sustain is so low, that one never can tell what will happen.
In the year 1858, a curious but unintentional satire on the judicial position of the husband occurred in one of the London courts. A delicate, much-abused woman, unmarried, but who had been, in her own phrase, "living for some time" with a man, brought an action against him for assault. Erysipelas had inflamed her wounds, and endangered her life.