Printed 110 years ago today in The Detroit Times. Image contrast/brightness modified, and some of the text cleaned up a bit; see the original. On the same page, an interesting article speculating on how the war in Europe that had just started (WW1) might end up.

Found on the Library of Congress site.

  • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    3 months ago

    Well one thing we know from that page is that Woman and Divorce Evil. I really wish that my eyes and brain would work together properly to be able to read more than a few lines of that because it’s super interesting to me when people are bitching about the same shit a century later.

    • Albbi
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      You can copy and paste from that newspaper! Very neat although there are some issues with character recognition. The following is the transcript of Woman and Divorce Evil and I’ve fixed up what I could.

      BY JUDGE THOS. F. GRAHAM, Noted Divorce Court Jurist

      Will women’s passionate struggle for economic independence result in a general break down of marriage and in the encroachment of love promiscuity?

      Yes. Already the court of records here and elsewhere have shown that to be a marked and disturbing tendency.

      Women. especially those who live in cities are today more responsible, I am convinced, for marital discord and divorce than men.

      As soon as a married woman is in position to make her own livelihood that moment trouble comes into the home. The husband becomes a suparnumery. That has been my experience

      It is profoundly interesting sad disturbing that their very independence of man’s support for which the women of today are so hotly striving, should result in this pronounced tendency to disrupt the home instead of cementing its bonds and fortifying the marriage institutions, as the feminist movement seeks to justify itself in argument.

      The average woman who cannot find employment in the professional or commercial world goes into the lodging-house business. That is a black day for “father.” He is relegated to the kitchen and given a couch to sleep on, while the star boarder, usually the best looking man in the house, is given the most comfortable room and the choice of everything.

      Many wives are made more arrogant, exacting and intolerant through financial independence than the husbands whom they arraign for these very faults. As bosses, wives have shown themselves less considerate of their mates than the average husband. When I say that economic independence seemingly is resulting in undermining the stability of the home I do not mean to imply that married women should remain idle. Work they must, above all else if they would check their share of responsibility in family discord. But it should be work in the home — in a different sphere than man’s. There must be inter-dependence rather than mutual independence.

      The fact that the divorce evil rests largely on a biological foundation, as I have found in my experience, makes it all the more imperative that woman should cease being a pretty drone, a useless ornament clamoring always for satisfaction in every pleasure impulse, as is the case in the class from which most divorce suits spring.

      At the end of the day husband and wife should he about equally tired physically, if harmony is to prevail.

      At present too many men are forced to drive themselves to exhaustion to maintain idle wives in luxury. They come home too fatigued to enter into the plans of indolent wives whose only activity is pleasure. The latter resent the apparent indifference, and discord and jealousies bring disaster.

      This to about the time the male affinity steps in, with “father” to provide the livelihood and the former to contribute the romance.

      And another divorce to on the way.

      Feminine aggressivism is to surely destroying woman’s reliance in any one man. The principle upon which monogamous marriage rests. It is subtly but profoundly affecting her love life in America today.

      (Tomorrow Mrs. Ines Haynes Gilmore, noted author, will give her views of Judge Graham’s idea in an article defending the new movement toward woman’s independence.)