About twenty years ago I broke a lance in favour of divorce in my “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” and hoped at that time to have seen it by now included in the laws of my country.
Twenty years ago I wrote:
“Divorce ought to be included among our laws as soon as possible: happy couples solicit it to secure their dignity, wounded by a tyrannical tie; the unhappy implore it on their bended knees, those who by misfortune or fault are condemned to the most supreme of human tortures: that of a slavery without redemption, of a yoke without rest, of a scourge without balm, of a grief without hope.”[1] Even to-day divorce is not made a law among us, but public opinion demands and will have it. No one in the present day dare defend it with the broken arms of the Church; but many defend it still in the name of the children and of the sanctity of the family.
[1] “Fisiologia dell’ amore,” Milano, 1873, p. 338.
There are too many innocent victims of matrimony for their voices not to be heard; and when the law-giver knows how to surround divorce with all the most delicate guarantees, he will increase the sanctity of the family and free the children from the cruelly abject spectacle of their two parents living under the same roof hating each other, with homicide in their thoughts, bearing the chains of convicts, without the courage or the strength to break them.
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Legislators must do this, the rest of the duty lies with those directors of the mind who are called writers, masters, and educators. They ought to teach the woman to know what love is, and what matrimony is, so that she should not give herself, bound hand and foot, to a contract which she knows by hearsay only, nor enter the dim future guided by paternal, maternal, or religious authority alone.
The possibilities of misfortune are a hundred times greater for the woman than for the man, for she is always more ignorant of things genital than we are, and goes to the altar or municipality ignorant of all, dragged like a lamb to the slaughter-house.
At the present day, under the customs to which our society conforms, the only profession of woman is that of wife and mother; and to this calling she is instructed from infancy, not to be an exemplary wife or perfect mother, but, if possible, to find a husband, and that an ideal one, one who is handsome, young, and above all rich. She is secretly and cleverly instructed in the art of hunting that rare game, a good husband; not in order to make him or herself happy, but to increase her income and to rise a step or two in the social scale. If in comfortable circumstances, she must become rich; if rich, a millionaire; if civilian, a countess; if countess, marchioness or princess. This is what she is to aim at; all her education has been directed to this end. Now, marriage should rise from its lower position of a business transaction to the higher one of a union of hearts and thoughts, and neither of the two companions ought to be able to look at each other with anger and think: