Staunton spectator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1849-1896, 1860-06-19
ssInnocent FIirtatlons.,,

| Ii there is any feature of American society
which cries more loudly than any other for re-
form, that feature par excellence is the system o.
.ftaTtGta0a carried on by married women. Nine
tenths Of all the divorce suits brought by hus
bands against their wives for criminaiity can be
traced directly to ''innocent Irritation" And
the weak victim of an elopemen. almost invari
ably can look back to her first error as commit
ted at the time when she received the attentions
of another than her husband. These ssinnocent
fllrtations' of married women are the abomina-
tons of modern society, and tend as directly tc
subvert the domestic relations as visiting tip
ping shops does to drunkenness. Sidney Smith
says, "Show me a woman who will not blush
while displaying her beauty, grace, or charms,
and you will have shown me one whose virtue
hangs upon thread which a word will cut."-
There are some women who can always see in
the many who surround them in their comming-
lings with society certain attractive points in
others that their experience tells them are not
possessed by their husbands, and whenever they
discern one of these apparent excellencies in
others they are sure to see a corresponding de-
fciency at home. Forgetting that none are per-
feet, such women are apt to magnify mole-hils
of faults into mountains of crimes. An uneasi-
ness, therefore, takes possession of them, and
they think over their husbauds' defects until
their happiness is destroyed, and they are pre-
pared to receive the attentions of all those
who approach them, hoping and expecting to
find "congeniality" which their own imagina-
tions have convinced them is essential to happi-
ness. This disquietade is heightened when thew
consider that they are bound already 10 matri-
monial obligations which cannot be severed, and
as society, though guilty of the same failines.
perhaps, equally with them, will not look with
complacency upon them in receiving familiar at
tentions in public, clandestine meetings are next
in consideration, and honor and virtue yield q
willing prey to prevented judgements and SEN
sual appetites. The wife seeks to keep from her
husband knowledge of her preference for an
other, until from her too oft repeated intimacies
with others her heart is utterly estranged from
hlm. Then, actuated by guilt alone, feeling her,
self debased beyond redemption, she throws off
the cloak OF privacy and emerges into the world
an outcast, despised and Stunned by those per-
haps equally as guilty, and by society at large
Is proof OF this needed2 Are not elopements the
order of the day2 Are they not coming to be
more prevalent than any other species of Crime :
Divorces by the dozen are of common occur
renee, and society is continually nauseated with
the tales OF guilt brought to light by the news
papers and the courts. We are not sure there is
any remedy for this state of things as long as
parents persist in training up their daughters in
idleness, and sons in luxury and efeminacy
|terly ignorant of the true aim and object Of ex-
stence, with only parlor education for the first
and .fast-life" for the other-having no great
her care than to carefully fit their daughters in
extensive appearance for the matrimonial mar
ket and to establish their SONS in positions
amongst the corrupt surroundings of fashionable
society, thus giving to both an outside show
which is entirely at var with the real business
of iife F.5 IL