The Errors of Society

1901

The dark blots that divorce makes in society are too easily seen and too sad to write much about, so I will give only a few incidents of the absurd and humiliating positions in which people may be placed:

I once occupied a seat on the grand stand at the Newport Casino during a tennis match. After I had been in my seat a short time, a man I knew, once divorced, but remarried, came in with his new wife and occupied the two seats on my left, and a few moments later the woman from whom he had been divorced and who had also remarried came in with her new husband and sat directly on my right.

Whether the ticket agent arranged this for a joke I am not prepared to say, but all went well until I grew tired of the game and got up, leaving the four in a straight row, which made an interesting picture for a few moments. The four soon realized, however, what people were staring and smiling at, and, looking daggers at one another, immediately rose and disappeared in the crowd. The incident amused the lads and misses very much.

A lady I know very well in New York, who was giving a dinner party, told me she always dreaded the arranging of her guests at her tables, lest she put people together whom the "law had set apart," as she put it. "It would be perfectly dreadful to seat a gentleman beside a lady to whom he is paying alimony." — Smart Set.

Refused 15 Cents Refused 15 Cents For Haircut, Man Asks For Divorce

La Crosse, Wisconsin, 1917

James B. Taylor is what some women would call a "model husband." He admits that every month he brought home his pay envelope to Friend Wife, whom her fond parents had christened Rena, and it seemed natural to him that he should have some rights with respect to the contents of the package for which he worked hard six days of the week, but—

She refused to give him 15 cents for a hair cut and once she hit him over the head with a book because he failed to account for 80 cents of his wages.

Those are the allegations which he makes in a divorce complaint filed in circuit court here Monday. James charges his wife with being "penurious, stingy and miserly" and nagging him for eight years. On top of that he charges that she admitted being in love with one Joe Crockeroff and also names one Louis Kinnear. both non-residents. The complaint recites that she left her husband to keep house for an uncle at Kendall, telling her provider that she "could not live with him if he was the last man in the world."

—The La Crosse Tribune and Leader-Press, La Crosse, Wisconsin, January 23, 1917, page 1.