Family and Civilization by Carle Zimmerman

Author:Carle Zimmerman
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781497635746
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Control of Marriage in the United States

in the Nineteenth Century

This argument on public control of marriage went on as before in the United States during the nineteenth century, both sides using the same reasons as before. Most outstanding, and yet typical of the thousands of arguments used, was the series of letters between Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen, published in the New York Tribune in 1860.

A few brief excerpts from these letters will illustrate the differences and will lead to the discussion of the development of that class in our modern population which seeks further relaxation of public control of marriage and the decrease of all the other paraphernalia of domestic familism.

Greeley in writing against elaboration and relaxation of the divorce laws in New York State in 1860 held:

The paradise of free-lovers is the State of Indiana, where the lax principles of Robert Dale Owen, and the utter want of principles of John Pettit [leading revisers of the laws] combined to establish, some years since, a state of law which enables men or women to get unmarried nearly at pleasure. A legal friend in that state recently remarked to us, that, at one County Court, he obtained eleven divorces one day before dinner; “and it wasn’t a good day for divorces either.” In one case within his knowledge, a prominent citizen of an Eastern manufacturing city, came to Indiana, went through the usual routine, and obtained his divorce about dinner-time, and in the course of the evening was married to his new inamorata, who had come on for the purpose, and was staying at the same hotel with him. They soon started home, having no more use for the State of Indiana; and, on arriving, he introduced his new wife to her astonished predecessor, whom he notified that she must pack up and go, as there was no room for her in that house any longer. And she went.

… we know of an instance in which a woman long since departed from her worthless husband, and trying hard to earn a meager living for their children, was disabled and crippled by a railroad accident; yet the law gives her no right of action against the culpable company; her broken ankles are legally her runaway husband’s, not her own; and he would probably sell them outright for a gallon of good brandy, and let the company finish the breaking of them at its own convenience. We heartily approve of such changes in our laws as would make this deserted wife the legal owner of her own ankles; but we would not dissolve the marriage obligation to constancy for any other cause than that recognized as sufficient by Jesus Christ.

To this polemic, Owen replied approximately as follows:

1. The Indiana law on divorce is largely as I found it thirty-four years ago. To its numerous provisions, I added only one—habitual drunkenness as a cause of divorce.

2. The Indiana law now requires a year’s residence for divorce jurisdiction.

3. The Indiana family is all right.

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