Is it well for the great middle classes of our civilized nations that is, for the classes that are not very poor or very rich, to contain these ever increasing number of celibate men and women? To such a question there can be only one reply. If it is ill, as we all admit, why do we not encourage the women of these middle classes to work and marry like the women of the poorer classes who are practically all married? Why in England and Germany and the United States are there these thousands upon thousands of unmarried women teachers, a celibate class like the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, and like them an ever present menace to the welfare of the state? Why in Italy, on the other hand, are so many of the women public school teachers married? Because in Germany and England and the United States women teachers lose their positions when they marry, and marry and starve they cannot. Because in Italy women teachers are allowed to marry and teach. Is it inconceivable that the state of the future in which women as well as men will vote will deprive women of bread because they wish to marry?
Marriage Laws in 1850
By Clarina Howard Nichols
(From speech at Woman’s Suffrage Convention in 1852. Quoted from “Life of Susan B. Anthony.”)
If a wife is compelled to get a divorce on account of the infidelity of the husband, she forfeits all right to the property which they have earned together, while the husband, who is the offender still remains the sole possession and control of the estate. She, the innocent party, goes out childless and portionless by decree of law, and he, the criminal, retains the home and children by favor of the same law. A drunkard takes his wife’s clothing to pay his rum bills, and the court declares that the action is legal because the wife belongs to the husband.
A Preventive of Divorce
By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson
(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
And here we come to the most potent of all causes of divorce—the conventionally enforced idleness of many married women—parasitism, Mrs. Schreiner calls it—and the overwork of many of our men.... The rush of our present life comes to bear most heavily on our most chivalrous. It wears them out physically and mentally and discourages them spiritually before they are fifty years of age. It gives them only time enough to nourish a vague doubt of the womanhood that is content to fatten their toil, instead of laboring staunchly with them as healthy women should do. They find their usefulness limited, their powers exhausted, and wonder why. And then, sometimes in utter weariness they throw off the yoke and try to begin again. But the women are not always wholly to blame for this condition. Sometimes with a perfectly unreasoning “I can support a wife” pride, a man will insist that a woman give up once and forever the only work in which she takes an interest, and leaves her a choice between idleness and housework in his home (which always, with or without fitness, a man will permit a woman to do)! But if a woman should say to her husband before, or soon after marriage, “John, it does not please me that you should be a lawyer—you must become a stock broker,” or “James, when you marry me you must give up the art you love and become a carpenter,” would we not be quick to decry her injustice? Yet there are men who still say to their wives, “The work you love you must give up. You may do the work I provide or none at all.”