Divorce as it might be / by E.S.P. Haynes.

  • Haynes, E. S. P. (Edmund Sidney Pollock), 1877-1949.
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Divorce as it might be / by E.S.P. Haynes. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    man to do? According to all the rules of the Christian religion he ought to forgive his wife up to seventy times seven. JBut if he did so, to the knowledge of society, he would become an object of universal ridicule. The world expects him to treat his wife from the very start worse than an ordinary criminal, to drive her outside the pale of respectable society, to prevent her from ever again seeing her children, and to expose her for days on end in the pillory which we know under the name of the Divorce Court. That is not an unfair version of the ordinary “defended” case where the husband wins. If he loses the result is almost as painful, for the two spouses are hopelessly alienated, and the legal tie is usually afterwards dissolved by one of them agreeing to commit the adultery required by law. What happens in the undefended case? The parties have for years felt an “unconquerable aversion” for each other. They may have no children to mitigate this aversion, or the aversion may be so strong as to poison the lives of the children as well as of the parents. They want to make a fresh start. They are, to use the Princess Bariatinsky’s expression about litigants in the Divorce Court, “shipwrecked people.” How are they to get free? ‘They are advised either that the wife has to commit adultery or that