Woman's chronicle. (Little Rock, Ark.) 1888-1???, 1890-02-08
A Woman's View of Divorce.
From the North American Review.1

complicated answer. Do justify the right of d.
vorce? Assuredly. When? When the question
is duel between wrong and right; when not
to give the right is to commit an undeniable wrong.
| justify divorce as | do surgical operation
then and thus only when it is the last expedient,
the final hope, the desperate venture; when there
is nothing else to be done to save the social life.
man and woman elect to tie themselves to-
gether for life, presumably because they cherish
each other above all human beings. To say that
the causes which practically invalidate this tie are
infinite in variety is only to say that human nature
exists. To insist that the causes which may legal
" separate the married should be limited in guam
tty is only to say that morality is virtue or frailty
vice. We should 60 so far as to make this limit
alton the severest, the most strenuous, that the
highest civilization will bear. cannot believe, in
this matter more than in others, in ''going under,
as the phrase has it, to compromise with ideal
Right. But what is ideal Right?
If man knocks his wife down, he skaters the
marrage-troth as much as if he brought an evil
woman to her house. If woman drinks away the
moral nature of her unborn babe, she ceases to be
wife as surely as if she broke the Seventh Com
mandment ''Infdelity' to the obligations of
marriage is term to which we give a too restricted
USE do not hesitate to say that personal abuse,
or felony before the law, desertion, or habitual
drunkenness or other equivalent Gf there be
equivalenD offences, may justify divorce as amply
as the crime of adultery. But that these offences
need to be identified with legal conscience sur
passing anything yet brought to bear upon our
statutes seems to me as much matter OF course
as to say that the United States needs navy. The
power to unmarry-in state OF society like ours
should be made ga strait and narrow way"
We have built it so broadly that thousands 60 in
thereat." 1t should be made unenviable, unpop-
ular, unlikely, and the judgment of the people
should hedge it about with thorns and barbed wire
1t should be made as dsgraceful as crime. 1t
should be made as hard as death.
The question whether divorced person ought
to marry again during the lifetime of the first part
ner is the last in but it is the poser of the discus
sion One gives an opinion on this point perfectly
aware that life and time may change it; for one
sees that experience modifes or creates opinion
easily enough on any subject but on none more
thoroughly than on this. The personal equation
affects our morality to an appalling extent; and
sanity Stephen Blackpool, looking up out OF the
pit of death at the pure face of Rachel, in Dickens
story, must have had his own views on divorce be-
fore which the comfortable Judgment OF happy
home ought to confess itself blind and cropping
thing But, so far as l feel qualified to form an
opinion upon so tremendous matter, l must be-
leve that Mr.. Gladstone in this discussion, and
Mr.. E. j. Phelps, in that of another review, have
come nearest to the right of the case when they
would deny to the divorced under any circum-
stances the right of remarriage until death shall
give it.
Now, this old question is threefeld one, and
ought to run like this Shall we marry Shall we
unmarry? Shall we remarry? Clearly, it seems
to me that the emphasis of the discussion has been
put in the wrong place. We should slip it further
along the line of interrogative. 1t is less import
ant to inquire, Do they ri ht to remarry! Were
they wrong to unmarry? than to ask, Did they
right to marry?
have spoken of the right Of divorce as sur
on the fUura of thOuUht