DIVORCE
All this has an important bearing on the question of divorce.
Divorce reformers are so much preoccupied with the injustice of
forbidding a woman to divorce her husband for unfaithfulness to
his marriage vow, whilst allowing him that power over her, that
they are apt to overlook the pressing need for admitting other and
far more important grounds for divorce. If we take a document like
Pepys' Diary, we learn that a woman may have an incorrigibly
unfaithful husband, and yet be much better off than if she had an
ill-tempered, peevish, maliciously sarcastic one, or was chained
for life to a criminal, a drunkard, a lunatic, an idle vagrant, or
a person whose religious faith was contrary to her own. Imagine
being married to a liar, a borrower, a mischief maker, a teaser or
tormentor of children and animals, or even simply to a bore!
Conceive yourself tied for life to one of the perfectly "faithful"
husbands who are sentenced to a month's imprisonment occasionally
for idly leaving their wives in childbirth without food, fire, or
attendance! What woman would not rather marry ten Pepyses? what
man a dozen Nell Gwynnes? Adultery, far from being the first and
only ground for divorce, might more reasonably be made the last,
or wholly excluded.
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