2591a / Grace Van Braam Gray

Grace Van Braam Gray

Grace Van Braam Gray, “Divorce Causes in Philadelphia Are of Eleven Brands,
Desertion and cruelty the main reasons, with the cruelty running all the way from nagging to nose-pulling.” in the Great Divide (Published weekly by the Denver Post; August 9, 1915), pages 1 and 9
via the Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection : link

Have not (so far) found much writing by Grace Van Braam Gray, profiled by A. C. Haeselbarth in The Editor and Publisher (October 11, 1913) : 2568.
Transcribed here is one of those items.

black bar ╹ at left margin returns page to top.
paragraphs are numbered to ease reference and proofing.

THERE are eleven separate causes for divorce in Pennsylvania, but fully 50 per cent of the decrees granted are got for desertion or cruel and barbarous treatment.
Divorce cases naming corespondents are comparatively few, but eases including habitual drunkenness as a cause or a part of extreme cruelty are many.
Pennsylvania, in spite of its wide range of reasons for divorce, is strict as to evidence, insisting upon the full letter of the law being proved.
Pennsylvania is almost the only state in the Union where insanity is a cause for divorce.
Use of drugs by women is mentioned in a large percentage of divorce suits in the state, but it is not among legal reasons for husbands securing freedom.
Thirty per cent of the women seeking divorces from their husbands are wage-earners, capable of supporting the children without the husband’s financial aid.
Alimony may be ordered at the discretion of the court, the old arbitrary rule that a husband must pay for the support of the woman, even in cases of absolute divorce, having been modified.
The law allowing women of Pennsylvania to secure a divorce for cruel and barbarous treatment was passed on March 18, 1815, but it was June 25, 1895, before the law allowed men to get a decree on the same charge.

As Described by Grace Van Braam Gray.

ONE thousand, eight hundred and seventy-six men and women were set free from the bonds of matrimony by the courts of Philadelphia during the year 1914. Nine hundred and thirty-eight decrees of divorce were granted, while thousands of pleas were refused and hundreds more are still pending, the divore courts, like vast mills of the gods, grinding out the coveted “certificates” week by week.
In this tremendous list, however, corespondents are comparatively few. Desertion and cruel and barbarous treatment are given as the cause in more than 59 per cent of the cases, and the question has become, Is Life itself the correspondent ? Has the evolution of humanity gone on by matrimony as it has been preconceived by custom, prejudice and the law?
Time was when the married man or woman was definitely put on the shelf and the man or woman of 40 was “middle-aged” and settled; but modern life, which has brought the aeroplane, the wireless, the motor car, the vacuum cleaner and the fox trot, has also brought a new view of youth. The man of 40 is still young nowadays, and the married woman is no longer imprisoned in the sphere of the home. The changing years have swept away old viewpoints and old habits. Modern inventions have lifted the cares of housework off a woman’s shoulders and modern independence has plunged her into the seething turmoil of a dozen different interests, but the marriage laws have remained the same — and sociologists and noted judges before whom divorce cases are tried unite in declaring that this failure of matrimony to shift with the world’s progress is one prominent reason for the divorces that in the eyes of the average American cast ao black a shadow over the country.
Marriage is, they point out, in its present state founded upon the theory of women as the homekeeper only, dependent upon the man. It definitely makes of them “one person;” but modern life with its changing conditions has made many men and women individualists, and the clash of two individualities, if maintained, means the wrecking of a home.
The modern American woman, and especially the Pennsylvanian, is emancipated in the highest sense of the word (even tho she doesn’t vote as yet). If she is rich, she has her own clubs, her own outdoor sports, her special charities, her own income and her political and social activities apart from her husband. She looks after the intensive farming on her own country estate: she handles her own investments; she runs her own motor car, and pursues her own pleasures quite independently of her husband, who, in consequence, often means but little in her life.
If she is poor, she turns wage-earner on her own account. It is her money that buys the children’s shoes, that supplies the daily luxuries, that gives her those dainty things that all women, even the most advanced of them, love. If she is clever, her business advancement is usually more swift than a man’s; and unless there exists that mysterious sympsthv that is the foundation of enduring love, her husband begins to drop out of her calculations, selfishness supplants sacrifice, and they begin to quarrel and chafe.
The modern woman demands, as one feminine writer has put it, “the right to direct her own life according to the dictates of her heart, her instincts and her conscience, flinging aside the old masks of custom, prejudice, concessions and hypocrisy.”
That primal instinct of the possessive in man is a big factor in the divorce problem of today and is the one point in which man is far behind woman in progress. To him the woman’s demand for independence, for equality in the standard of morals, and autonomy instead of pocket money, is absurd. She is not an individual, but his wife; he still sees her as the clinging vine, and when he discovers his mistake, in many instances, he — deserts her.
Men have slowly but surely capitulated to the business woman and meet her on an equal footing. They admit feminine equality in writing, painting, music, and in discussing affairs, for her intuition and sensitiveness put her in touch with the throbbing pulse of world progress. When, however, the husband rises above the man he goes back to those primal instincts and is the pursuer or the master; but the woman has outgrown her old primal instincts of flight and submission and is defiant. “I am an independent personality,” she says, “and my love must be the free gift of one equal to another — not given on demand for duty!”
The court records themselves, and every lawyer into whose bands the fragments of broken happiness are flung, point out that it is seldom a great crime or a heavy sin that wrecks a home and causes the severing of matrimonial bonds, but is — little things. Trivial incidents may be not so much the cause as the effect of a turmoil born not of the faults of either man or woman, but of actual conditions of life and [9] modern progress, a turmoil caused by a progression of both husband and wife — along very different lines.
The faster a woman progresses the broader grow her interests; but a man, by reason of his need for success, must bind his enthusiasm and his ambitions into one strong business effort and progress along one line. In other words, men and specialists and women are general practitioners in life; and this too tends to strain that invisible bond of marriage.
It is also the cause of the introduction in such a large percentage of modern divorce causes of the phrase. “He’d rather talk to the woman in his office than to me,” or, on the other hand. “My home is always full of friends of my wife with whom I have nothing in common.”
The “woman in his office” — his secretary or his stenographer or perhaps a business associate — is, however broad her outside interests, still more or less of the same sort of specialist as the man himself. To him she extends ready understanding and an interest in his problems which his wife seldom takes. He sees only one side of this woman, while he must perforce see all sides of his wife, and in consequence the “woman in his office” — that shadowy presence in the hundreds of divorce suits, tho seldom named as an actual corespondent — stands to the man for companionship and understanding.
On the other hand, the wife seeking for the best in life in art. literature, music and fads fills her life with those who can give her this sort of companionship. Housework, the-children and cooking no longer occupy her hours; modern life has set her more or less free from these and she finds her husband’s concentration on business woefully narrow and uninteresting. From her viewpoint the husband is lacking in sympathy with her endeavors to make life beautitful, and is narrow-minded and “grouchy” to her friends The growth of each as an individual is away from the other the moment the strong bond of mutual passion is severed.
But while the result is seemingly a tragedy, sociologists declare that it is helping the race to higher standards and that when human nature has adjusted itself to the new fact that woman is intellectually the equal of man, and man has beaten down his primal instincts of dominance, marriage as a real partnership will reach a higher standard than ever before; but the route to this ultima Thule lies thru the grime of the divorce courts.
America, they add, leads all nations of the world in the numbers of Ha divorce cases, and Pennsylvania is one of the states having the broadest list of causes for which a husband or wife can seek freedom; but this means not less morality, but more. Love affairs, even careless flirtations by married people, are frowned upon as severely in this country as they are smiled upon lightly in Europe, and the standard of clean living for both men and women is highest in this country, and many divorces are due to the fact that American women set too high a standard of love to continue in the marriage relation when love itself is dead.
Marriage in which reciprocal affection is not the basis is sweepingly condemned in this country: and even in Europe, where the “arranged marriage” has been in force so long, there is a decided trend toward love matches now. Why not, therefore, say some American women, dissolve a marriage when love has ceased to exist? — for the true dissolution of marriage comes from the divergence of the mind and heart, not the legal severing of matrimonial bonds.
There is, however, one black shadow across the records of divorces in this state, whatever the cause given, and that is the part which drugs and alcohol play, the use of both, it is asserted, being the direct result of the seething rush of modern life.
Women, striving as they are to forge ahead, to eliminate the results of generations of placidity, fill their lives too full for their strength. They try to combine the duties of a housewife and mother with political and social activity. They pursue with zest each new fad or “movement,” which is momentarily the faahion, and combine, more or less successfully, the professions of a sportswoman, danseuse, student, business woman and charity worker; and the result is that the weakest of them, with overtaxed brain and body, droop under the strain. Shaky nerves require a “bracer,” an aching head one of those powders that eliminate pain; a tired body hungers for a “little dose of tonic” and the “fashionable” diseases of each passing season lead yearly to the taking of popular “cures.”
So brain and body grow more and more used to drugs until the woman neglects everything for indulgence in them. No greater tragedy than this can be recorded. Sometimes the use of drugs is brought about by a real illness that requires an opiate, on some occasions the use of cigarettes containing a sedative has started it; but to the average woman, being more or less frail of body, the use of drugs soon becomes a morbid craving.
The business woman is far less addicted to them than the woman who has nothing to do but pamper her body and think about herself, the patent medicine drug taker of the country town is, judging from state records, almost as prevalent as the woman in town who takes more fashionable prescriptions.
It is not, however, a reason for divorce in that state, tho Ringrose cites it as one of the reasons in Mississippi. It is, however, mentioned in hundreds of cases of desertion and cruel and barbarous treatment, balancing, perhaps even overbalancing, the prevalence of “drunkenness” on the part of the husband.
(Copyright, 1915, by The North American Co.)

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