A Woman LL.D, on Divorce.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 6, 10 August 1910, Page 8

A Woman LL.D, on Divorce.

LONDON', June 24. What may be termed the advanced feminine view of divorce was given in Mrs Fawcett’s evidence before the Divorce Commission this week. Mrs Fawcett, widow of the late Kight Hon. Henry Fawcett, Postmaster-General, is president of the National I nion of Women’s {Suffrage Societies, and holds the degree of Doctor of Laws. She is the first woman to give evidence before the Commission who has represented the great woman movement of which the

struggle for the franchise is a phase. There have beeu three other women witnesses, but they gave what one may call the strict church view of divorce, rather than the woman’s view. Two were representatives of the Mothers’ Union, and the third was a East End vicar’s wife. They were opposed to divorce altogether. Adultery, cruelty, habitual drunkenness, desertion, crime, lunacy, were in their eyes no justification for dissolving the bond between man and wife. It remains for Mrs Fawcett to voice the views of a great body of educated women. She did not agree with the Scriptural point of view of the Church of England as to the indissolubility of marriage. Dealing with the divorce law as it stood at present, she said it did not conduce to a high standard of fidelity in marriage, because, by treating unfaithfulness on the part of the husband as a less offence against marriage than unfaithfulness on the part of the wife, it encouraged laxity of conduct on the part of men. Practically the law now sanctioned polygamy, or at any rate concubinage, for men, whilst insisting upon monogamy for women. The wholly subordinate legal position of the wife in regard to the guardianship of her children during the lifetime of her husband appeared to her to be injurious to the marriage relation. There should be full recognition of the physical and moral facts of parentage and of the joint authority and responsibility of both parents. She also felt that the law was most gravely unsatisfactory in not sufficiently recognising the responsibility of the father for the maintenance of the child born out of wedlock. She would not enter into the question whether the husband should forgive an unfaithful wife or a wife forgive an unfaithful husband. Men had helped to build up a fairly high standard of domestic morality among women by exacting scrupulous fidelity from their wives. Women should imitate them in this and demand a similar fidelity from their husbands, both before and during marriage. They would thus 'be rendering in the future the same service to men which men through uncounted generations had been bestowing on women. Lady Frances Balfour: Have yon any view of how the difference was made between the man and the woman when tin Divorce Act was passed? The witness: I was always of the opinion that those who passed it thought that otherwise 99 men out of 100 would he subject to divorce proceedings. Do you think it was based on any Scriptural point of view?—l do not think so. It was made by men in their own interest?—What they supposed to be their own interest.