Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

But if the parties to this contract learn to their sorrow that the association is productive of misery, if they grow to loathe each other, if instead of happiness, it results in sorrow or ill health, then surely the State is not interested in forcing those two people to continue in a condition which is opposed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is however, concerned in the terms of the separation since these do or may affect others than the two principals, and since one or both of these, having entered into a contract (in which the State was a witness) and now being desirous of terminating said contract, may be defrauded in a manner which vitally affects society. It can hardly be claimed that society is benefited by forcing two people to live in the same house and become the parents of children, when these two people have for each other only loathing or contempt. If it cannot benefit society, then who is benefited by the forced continuance of the marriage relation? The children? Can any rational person believe that it is well to rear children in an atmosphere of hatred, of contention, of rebellion?

Do not our penal institutions answer this question? Are the inmates of these from homes where harmony reigned? Statistics show plainly that they are not; and they also show that an enormous per cent, of them come from the families of those who are not allowed by their church the relief of divorce from bonds grown galling. Children conceived by hatred and fear, overpowered by the lowest grade of passion known to the world (which cannot be called brutal, because the brutes are not guilty of it), bred in an atmosphere of contention, deception, and dread, are fit material for, and statistics prove that they are the class from which are recruited the inmates of, the reformatory and penal institutions.

Is it fair to a child that it be so reared? Is it not right—is it not the duty of the State to secure, so far as it may, quite the opposite conditions of life for its helpless future citizens? Are the highest and best types of character bred in discord? Is the State interested in the high character of its future citizens? All these questions and many others are involved.

But setting aside these most important features I would like to ask who is benefited by keeping together those whom hate has separated? The wife? Not at all. She is simply degraded below the frail creatures of the street whom men deride. She becomes the helpless instrument of her own degradation. The woman of the street may own herself, she may change her life, she may refuse to continue in the course which has lost her her self-respect. The unwilling wife is helpless. She has lost all. She has no refuge. She is a more degraded slave than ever felt the lash, for her slavery is one which sears her soul and will, if she becomes a mother, sear the bodies and souls of children borne by her unwillingly.

It can hardly be urged that it could add to the dignity or honor of womanhood for a tie to be indissoluble which in itself, under such conditions, is a degradation and an insult. Take for example a drunken, a dissolute or a brutal husband. Can it be said to strike at anything dear or noble for womankind that some wife is absolutely freed from such companionship? That she be no longer forced to bear his society or even his name? Surely no good end can be served by the outward continuance of a tie already broken in fact. No one can be made better, no one happier. If it is urged that a God is to be considered, surely such a state of things could hardly excite his pleasure or admiration. If marriages are made in heaven those that prove a misfit—so to speak—can scarcely be claimed by believers in an all-wise ruler to emanate from there. Religious people will, I fancy, be the last to assert that wrong had its source in such a locality; while people who look upon this question as wholly outside of sacramental lines will be slow to see beauty or good in a relation which is a servitude and a degradation on the one side and a brutal domination on the other.

How does the question stand then? The wife is degraded, the children are brutalized—are born with evil tendencies—a God can hardly be overjoyed; society is endangered and robbed, is deprived from its very cradle of its inalienable right to happiness. Who is left to be considered? The husband?

Would any man worthy the name wish to be the husband of an unwilling wife? If he has a spark of honor or manhood in him could such a relationship, held by force, give him happiness? Would it not be unendurable to him?

If he is so far below the brutes in his relationship with his mate that he can hold his position only by force is he a fit father of children? Is the State interested in reproducing his kind?

It is true that there are several reasons why divorce is far more important to women than to men—notwithstanding which fact the question is usually discussed in the Press and Legislature by men only, the other interested party not being supposed to have enough at stake to be consulted or heard in the matter at all. But it is also true that an uncongenial marriage deprives a man of all of the best that is in him; it reduces his home to a mere den of discomfort and wretchedness; it forces him to be either a hypocrite at or an absentee from his own hearthstone and deprives him of the blessedness and sympathy—the holy tenderness and beauty—that should be the star in the crown of every man entitled to the name of husband and father.

But he still owns his own body. He cannot be made an unwilling father of timid, diseased, or brutalized children; he is not a financial dependent. For these and other reasons an unhappy marriage can never mean to a man what it must always mean to a woman.