Divorce (to-day and to-morrow) / by C. Gasquoine Hartley.

  • Catherine Gasquoine Hartley
Date:
[1921]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Divorce (to-day and to-morrow) / by C. Gasquoine Hartley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    this havoc-working fear of love and of woman. Whenever we find it acting, there also do we find opposition to divorce. This is the second fact I must ask you to accept. Fear has been the hot-bed, wherein have been forced rank plants of shame, of persecution, of punishments—plants of persistent, but unhealthy growth, that even to-day spring up to hinder the workers who strive to clear the soil of the fair garden of marriage from the rank and choking growth. in But I diverge a little in making these remarks. Marriage under the liberal Roman law was a private contract, of which the basis was consent, with no shame attached to the dissolution, provided it was carried out with the due legal form, in the presence of competent witnesses. Both husband and wife had equal liberty of divorce, only with certain pecuniary disadvantages connected with the forfeit¬ ing of the wife’s dowry, for the husband whose fault led to the divorce. It was expressly stated that the husband had no right to demand fidelity from his wife unless he had practised the same himself. “ Such a system,” says Havelock Ellis,1 “ is obviously more in harmony with modern civilised feeling than any system that has ever been set up in Christendom.” ” In the last days of the Republic,” he writes further, “ women already began to attain the same legal level as men, and later the great Antonine jurisconsults, guided by the theory of 1 Psychology of Sex/7 Vol. vi., p. 395 ff.
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