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.

Men's Names Shield in Vice Raids, Women's Names Published

Kingston, New York, 1916

MEN SHIELDED IN CITY VICE RAIDS

Women Protest at Action of Police — Publication of One Woman's Name Led Daughter to Leave City for Shame of Exposure

Poughkeepsie women are making a spirited protest because the police in making raids on certain alleged disorderly hotels in that city gave out the names of the women taken but withheld the names of 59 "gentlemen" who were permitted to go. Because of the publication of the name of one of the women in the affair, her daughter who is a young woman of refinement and a member of the Y. W. C. A., was so humiliated that she has disappeared and all efforts to locate her have failed.

Miss Mary Hinkley, president of the Women's League for Civic Education, who led the discussion, pointed out as ridiculous the excuse she said was offered by the district attorney shielding the men, "that many of the latter were respectable and in danger of losing their positions." When some one brought up the argument that the families of the men must be protected, it was asked, "What of the families of the women; what of the case that has just come to light?"

"We are disgusted at this periodic revelation," Miss Mary Hinkley said, "We must clean up the dirt once for all and be thoroughly assured that after one case has been brought to light, paraded to the public gaze and rectified, that another won't be found again and the endless tragedy repeated over and over."

—The Kingston Daily Freeman, Kingston, New York, June 29, 1916, page 2.