January 16, 2010

Pink and White Tyranny, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Here's an early feminist argument against legal divorce: it would be unfair to the weaker sisters, who would find themselves abandoned and go to the bad.

Beecher Stowe loads the dice; the frivolous and greedy wife doesn't go completely to the bad while married, and her husband and daughter become only better in character for meeting the burden laid on them, and the woman the husband should have married isn't destroyed wihtout him, etc. God, Beecher Stowe argues, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who benefits from the bracing exposure.

Project Gutenberg file #12354, Pink and White Tyranny

So wrote clew in Fiction (19th c.).
And thus wrote others:
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