There are many other cases of great interest in the Divorce Colony at Sioux Falls, but this plain statement of a few is enough to show how grossly the personnel and character of the colony have been slandered by certain sensational and corrupt newspaper correspondents. For more than six months I have studied the conduct and natures of the persons who compose the divorce colony, and every reputable citizen of Sioux Falls will substantiate my statement that, with possibly three exceptions, the divorce seekers have been remarkable for the inherent justice of their suits and the dignity of their behavior during their residence in this town. The attempt to give them and the place an unenviable notoriety, made by certain newspapers, is a stain on American journalism. Men and women suffer enough before they seek a divorce court. It is ghoulish to pursue them in the press with misrepresentation and ridicule, or with exposure of their marital miseries. Divorce is not merely a legal right of the individual; it is often a moral duty which ought to be demanded by society from a truly dignified woman or man; for to cohabit where there is no love between husband and wife, worse still where the atmosphere has become surcharged with hate, and to foist on society children begotten and reared in an atmosphere that may crush out every noble impulse and lofty desire, besides the subtle discords of heredity that must mark their temperaments, is not merely a most pathetic blunder for the parties primarily affected, but a wrong to the race—a crime against civilization.
THE WOMAN MOVEMENT.
BY LUCINDA B. CHANDLER.
The woman movement is a world-wide fact. An agitation which has gathered impetus and strength during more than forty years is a significant phenomenon in the realm of mind and of social progress.
Since, in 1848, the rebellion of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the humiliating position accorded them as delegates to an international convention in London, England, led them to inaugurate the “woman’s rights” movement in this country, at Seneca Falls, New York, the growth of this “mustard seed” of truth has become a “great tree” whose branches overshadow continents, and the thought and active moral forces of nations “dwell in the branches thereof.”
If not from “Greenland’s icy mountains,” at least from the boundaries of the United States and British America to “India’s coral strand,” the onsweeping wave of woman’s elevation is steadily advancing.
Ramabai in India seeking the deliverance of the child widow, who has no earthly existence, nor any hope of one beyond mortal life except as a wife, and who, as a widow, is but an outcast, this woman missionary from the opposite side of the globe has clasped hands and is in heart-fellowship with her American sisters who are still seeking the enlargement of woman’s freedom and opportunities in this favored country.