No man not poisoned by superstition will object to the release of an abused wife. In such a case only savages can object to divorce. The man who wants courts and legislatures to force a woman to live with him is a monster.
Question. Do you believe that the divorced should be allowed to marry again?
Answer. Certainly. Has the woman whose rights have been outraged no right to build another home? Must this woman, full of kindness, affection and health, be chained until death releases her? Is there no future for her? Must she be an outcast forever? Can she never sit by her own hearth, with the arms of her children about her neck, and by her side a husband who loves and protects her?
There are no two sides to this question.
All human beings should be allowed to correct their mistakes. If the wife has flagrantly violated the contract of marriage, the husband should be given a divorce. If the wife wants a divorce, if she loathes her husband, if she no longer loves him, then the divorce should be granted.
It is immoral for a woman to live as the wife of a man whom she abhors. The home should be pure. Children should be well-born. Their parents should love one another.
Marriages are made by men and women, not by society, not by the state, not by the church, not by the gods. Nothing is moral, that does not tend to the well-being of sentient beings.
The good home is the unit of good government. The hearthstone is the corner-stone of civilization. Society is not interested in the preservation of hateful homes. It is not to the interest of society that good women should be enslaved or that they should become mothers by husbands whom they hate.
Most of the laws about divorce are absurd or cruel, and ought to be repealed.
—The Herald, New York, February, 1897.