Any tolerable western divorce law must put the sentimental grievances
first, and should carefully avoid singling out any ground of divorce in
such a way as to create a convention that persons having that ground are
bound in honor to avail themselves of it. It is generally admitted that
people should not be encouraged to petition for a divorce in a fit of
petulance. What is not so clearly seen is that neither should they be
encouraged to petition in a fit of jealousy, which is certainly the most
detestable and mischievous of all the passions that enjoy public credit.
Still less should people who are not jealous be urged to behave as if
they were jealous, and to enter upon duels and divorce suits in which
they have no desire to be successful. There should be no publication of
the grounds on which a divorce is sought or granted; and as this would
abolish the only means the public now has of ascertaining that every
possible effort has been made to keep the couple united against their
wills, such privacy will only be tolerated when we at last admit that
the sole and sufficient reason why people should be granted a divorce is
that they want one. Then there will be no more reports of divorce
cases, no more letters read in court with an indelicacy that makes
every sensitive person shudder and recoil as from a profanation, no more
washing of household linen, dirty or clean, in public. We must learn
in these matters to mind our own business and not impose our individual
notions of propriety on one another, even if it carries us to the length
of openly admitting what we are now compelled to assume silently, that
every human being has a right to sexual experience, and that the law is
concerned only with parentage, which is now a separate matter.