No greater revolution than this will have been wrought by the Great World War. It is going to be safe to permit to wives in all lands that they retain their own nationality. The reason is clear: because no one can compel this new woman, even though she is a wife, to be a spy, or anything else that she does not wish to be. Or anything else that she does not wish to be!
In those words, the woman movement of to-day full-throated carols a hope for humanity that has not echoed before in all the epics or the sagas or the inspired revelations since the fall of man. Who giveth this woman in marriage? She who was a bondwoman now is free. And church and state shall hear her terms!
Oh, yes, they shall! For a reform of the institution on which society rests is all that will prevent a rebellion against it. What do women want? This woman who turns the ring on her finger? Read the publications that during the past decade have said: The Free Woman, edited by Dora Marsden in England; Minna Cauer’s Die Frauenbewegung and Marie Stritt’s Die Frauenfrage and Helene Stocker’s Die Neue Generation in Germany; La Française, edited by Jane Misme in France; and Margaret Sanger’s The Woman Rebel in New York; the teachings of Dr. Alice Vickerey in London and of Dr. Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam. There were even women in the radical vanguard of that woman movement of yesterday who were ready to end marriage if it were not mended.
The world—and man who made it—had no adequate conception of the hurt that was smothered and smouldering in the heart of her over whom he exercised his dominion and power. Windows were heard smashing in England. Over in Germany there had begun a breaking with less noise about it, so that the world in general did not know. In the Kaiser’s kingdom right in the face of the mailed fist, traditions not to be so easily repaired as glass were being shattered. But it was the suffragette outburst in London that caught public attention. Thoughtful men who honestly wanted to know—and never could understand—turned to each other with the question, Why do women do this? And no man could tell.
Gentlemen, come with me. There is sitting in Westminster in 1910 a Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce. Not yet even have their findings changed English law. But the commission was appointed to make inquiry into these matters in response to a rising feeling of unrest over the present arrangements. Witnesses, to give evidence that it may be determined what ought to be done, are in 1910 being called. This government commission, it should be noted, quite contrary to precedent, includes among the churchmen and statesmen who have been appointed to decide the question, also two women. One of them, the Lady Francis Balfour, is interrogating a witness whom she has summoned to the stand because she has a particular point that she wishes to elucidate. He is the Bishop of Birmingham, whose church insists that at marriage the woman passes indissolubly into the power of the husband. To the man, it is permitted that he may divorce her for adultery. But so long as these two shall live, not even for that offence on his part may she have release. He may beat her. He may flay her soul. But she is his—unless she gets all of these details spread on the public records and the judges of the courts decide that there are enough of them legally to constitute “cruelty.” Then, for adultery together with this cruelty on the part of a husband, a few English women have been allowed divorce. But it is very difficult and very expensive and very offensive to the clergy when it has been actually accomplished.
The Lady Francis Balfour is speaking. To the Bishop of Birmingham she is saying: “Let me take a concrete case. You may have a woman who is a Christian and you may have her husband ill using her in some sort of way. We have had evidence put before us, which is of course known to us all, that there are even men who live on the prostitution of their wives. Now, is that not a contract which has been broken on the one side in the worst possible way? Are they twain one flesh? Is that for better and for worse?”
Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.”
Lady Francis Balfour: “And is that wife to stick to that husband, she being a Christian, and to do as he commands her?”
Bishop of Birmingham: “Yes, I am afraid so.”
WHAT WOULD MEN HAVE DONE?