This—like all other obsolete laws—is meaningless to the erotically refined, who live above the law’s standpoint. But the lower the level, the more certainly does the husband enforce his “right” under circumstances the most repulsive or most dangerous to the wife, just as—contrary to his present right—he extorts from her the earnings of her labour.
No law will be able to hinder the wife from continuing voluntarily to allow her husband to violate her person, squander her property, or ruin her children; for the law cannot seal up the sources of weakness and conflict which arise from the human being’s own nature.
But what we have a right to demand of the marriage law is that it shall cease itself to extend these sources.
The law must be so contrived that it leaves to happiness the greatest possible freedom for its own formative power, while, on the other hand, it limits as far as possible the consequences of unhappiness; and this can be brought about only by each party’s complete independence of the other.
It is, therefore, not sufficient that the husband’s guardianship and the wife’s legal incapacity should cease. Every provision also which has for its object to bind the wife by her husband’s condition and circumstances must be revoked.
The majority of men now cherish the belief that a wife who leaves her husband’s house can be brought back with the aid of the law. This is, doubtless, a mistake. But even if the letter of the law in this case also is better than the popular idea of it, the whole spirit of the law, nevertheless, entails the obligation of married people to live together.
The more personality is developed, however, the more uncertain it becomes that every person’s erotic needs are answered by this arrangement. There are, on the contrary, such natures as would have loved for life, if they had not, day after day, year after year, been forced to adapt their wills, their habits, and their opinions to one another. Nay, many misfortunes depend upon pure trifles, which two people with courage and foresight might easily have dealt with, if the instinct of happiness had not been silenced by consideration for convention. The more a woman has enjoyed personal liberty before marriage, the less she can endure not to have a moment or a corner in her home which she can call her own. And the more the people of the present day enlarge their individual freedom of movement, their need of solitude in other respects, the more will both man and woman enlarge them in marriage.
But even if those desiring solitude remain in the minority, they must still be granted both by the law and by public opinion full liberty to shape their married life according to their own requirements.
Conventionality and mental inertness pronounce this unheard-of, even immoral. On the other hand, it is regarded as equally natural and moral that the majority of sailors and commercial travellers should live for the greater part of the year apart from their wives; that journeys for scientific or artistic purposes should separate married people for years, or that—in exceptional cases—one of them, for instance, should spend the winters as a gymnast in England while the other is a teacher in Sweden.