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. The present law is
perfectly logical only if you once admit (as no decent person ever does)
its fundamental assumption that there can be no companionship between
men and women because the woman has a "sphere" of her own, that of
housekeeping, in which the man must not meddle, whilst he has all the
rest of human activity for his sphere: the only point at which the
two spheres touch being that of replenishing the population. On this
assumption the man naturally asks for a guarantee that the children
shall be his because he has to find the money to support them. The power
of divorcing a woman for adultery is this guarantee, a guarantee that
she does not need to protect her against a similar imposture on his
part, because he cannot bear children. No doubt he can spend the
money that ought to be spent on her children on another woman and her
children; but this is desertion, which is a separate matter. The
fact for us to seize is that in the eye of the law, adultery without
consequences is merely a sentimental grievance, whereas the planting
on one man of another man's offspring is a substantial one. And so, no
doubt, it is; but the day has gone by for basing laws on the assumption
that a woman is less to a man than his dog, and thereby encouraging and
accepting the standards of the husbands who buy meat for their bull-pups
and leave their wives and children hungry. That basis is the penalty we
pay for having borrowed our religion from the East, instead of building
up a religion of our own out of our western inspiration and western
sentiment. The result is that we all believe that our religion is on its
last legs, whereas the truth is that it is not yet born, though the age
walks visibly pregnant with it. Meanwhile, as women are dragged down by
their oriental servitude to our men, and as, further, women drag down
those who degrade them quite as effectually as men do, there are moments
when it is difficult to see anything in our sex institutions except a
police des moeurs keeping the field for a competition as to which sex
shall corrupt the other most.