Reckless Abandon

Harriet Beecher Stowe on Modern Feminists & Divorce

If ever there’s been someone who set records straight, it’s Harriet Beecher Stowe, capiche? We know her as the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war, as Abraham Lincoln, another guy out to make corrections, once quipped.

Yet her profound rectitude, so much in evidence in her writing, cannot but give pause at this point:

It was because woman is helpless and weak, and because Christ was her great Protector, that he made the law of marriage irrevocable. . . . If the sacredness of the marriage-contract did not hold, if the Church and all good men and all good women did not uphold it with their might and main, it is easy to see where the career of many women . . . would end.

So wrote Stowe in Pink and White Tyranny, an 1871 novel that she identified upfront as a moral-driven parable. It is the story of John and Lillie, a disciplined Christian man and the undisciplined woman he marries. It is a story of charm and beauty, beauty and truth, and how awkward it can be when all three try to get together.

John falls for Lillie because she’s a hyper-babe. The poor man thinks that a girl who’s pretty on the outside must be pretty on the inside. Hijinks ensue, of course. Lillie could be worse, but she could be a whole lot better, and John’s pious mind could imagine nothing but the latter. When reality visits their marriage, John is moved to greater virtue by his virtuous sister Grace, whereupon Lillie is eventually moved to both repentance and [spoiler alert] death.

This turn of events is what gives occasion for Stowe’s moral, cited above. But the visitation of reality in our own time calls the moral into question. Can marriage really be claimed to protect women if so many women are willingly abandoning it?

Restless Wives

In September 2021, the New York Times published a personal reflection of law professor Lara Bazelon: “There was no emotional or physical abuse in our home. There was no absence of love. . . . I divorced my husband not because I didn’t love him. I divorced him because I loved myself more.”¹

A few months later, The Atlantic aired a similar disclosure from editor Honor Jones:

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. . . . The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. . . . But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him.²

What is their problem, exactly? It’s that one can have no complaints about her husband, and still have negative use for him. The solution to the problem is to leave.

Women with the wherewithal to make their musings everyone’s business are not the only ones making such decisions. The Survey Center on American Life recently published data revealing that 66 percent of divorces are initiated by women.³ Surveys don’t include stories, but the Fourth Estate is happy to fill in that gap. Women like Lara and Honor aren’t happy, so they leave. And what woman isn’t like Lara or Honor?

Married women keep telling us that they are intractably miserable with husbands who do not beat them, drink too much, disappear, or carry on with other women. These men aren’t doing any of the things that were once sold as pretexts for making divorce widely available to women. They just aren’t making their wives’ lives happy anymore.

The Grace Effect

The deserting wives seem to experience boredom, frustration, or annoyances as pain. Whatever may be said of this, their ruminations sound a lot like John’s in Pink and White Tyranny. Lovely Lillie is morbidly selfish and has no integrity. The process of discovering this devastates John:

I have nothing to live for,—nobody and nothing. My wife, Gracie! she is worse than nothing,—worse, oh! infinitely worse than nothing! She is a chain and a shackle. She is my obstacle. She tortures me and hinders me every way and everywhere. There will never be a home for me where she is; and, because she is there, no other woman can make a home for me. Oh, I wish she would go away, and stay away! I would not care if I never saw her face again.

Grace acknowledges that Lillie is a wreck of a person but frames this wreckage as spiritual sickness. Under his marriage vows, John would care for Lillie if she fell ill, and it is clear that Lillie is a “moral invalid.” With the committed help of Grace and other friends and neighbors, John finds the strength to cleave to his chronically ill wife and nurse her toward wellness to the extent that her misshapen character is able to possess it.

The difference between Stowe’s story and those of Lara and Honor is a lack of Grace. Apparently, no one told them they had a duty toward the helpless and weak—the husbands who had no recourse under a laughably dissoluble contract or the children whose worlds shatter when a parent radically reconfigures the family.

Steeped in the first-wave feminist milieu, Stowe was not in a position to foresee that the losers under a lax divorce ethos might end up being someone other than women. She could not have known that decades of policies crafted on the pretext of bailing women out of bad situations would end with the betrayal and abandonment being recklessly visited on men and children.

Far less could anyone have imagined the flippancy with which marriages would be voided. Honor Jones was driven to crisis, which she then visited on her husband and children, by crushed Cheerios in her house. Lara thinks understanding divorce as a “radical act of self-love” is insightful rather than contemptible.

A Perverse Freedom

In Pink and White Tyranny, Stowe shows how the seemingly powerless partner in a marriage is able to subvert, manipulate, and injure the “almighty” head of the house. Feminine tyranny no longer has to go to the trouble of being pink and white. Any time a wife is unhappy, the court of public opinion will likely find her husband at fault. Moreover, a wife can leave her husband and children at any time, for any reason, and be applauded for her brave decision. If she’s feeling generous, she can spread her reasoning to the less fortunate by way of a prestigious publisher.

Least of all is a diagnosis of moral illness admissible in public judgments of marital defectors. To people raised on second- and third-wave feminist values, self-sacrifice on the part of wives and mothers is a pathology. Surrendering any form of personal comfort or satisfaction in the interest of a husband’s or child’s well-being is evidence of internalized sexist oppression.

Beloved Mrs. Stowe, champion of human freedom, would find herself far less popular were her moralizing on marriage to gain a wider readership:

Men have the power to reflect before the choice is made; and that is the only proper time for reflection. But, when once marriage is made and consummated, it should be as fixed a fact as the laws of nature. And they who suffer under its stringency should suffer as those who endure for the public good.

Was Stowe not as arrestingly right as she is usually memorialized to be? Or is it possible that she had a better understanding of freedom than ravenous Lara and jaundiced Honor?

Walking out on an unoffending man and powerless children is not liberated but libertine. Pursuing personal gain even when it cruelly wounds people is the perverse “freedom” of that undisputed moral invalid we now revile, the slaveholder. If only someone would write a book about that.

Notes
1. nytimes.com/2021/09/30/opinion/divorce-children.html.
2. theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/12/divorce-parenting/621054.
3. americansurveycenter.org/research/emerging-trends-and-enduring-patterns-in-american-family-life.