Margaret and Flo. 1910 era.Here's an editorial from the 1909 Ladies' Home Journal, I referred to in another blog. Now, as I've written, the LJH was not one of the many magazines out there in 1910 crying for women's equality and social reform. I find this article interesting for the beginning, which is on the lines of La Plus ca Change.. but the second part is really quite weird, for a socially conservative magazine.
"Every once in a while the American Family is predicted as on the verge of dissolution, and lugubrious articles will appear in the public prints. Thirty years ago alcoholism was going to disrupt the American home: then drinking was found to be on the decrease and the American fireside thrived. Then the marriage rate was found to be on the decrease, and again the American family was on the brink. Now, it appears that the marriage rate for the last twenty years has actually increased. Again came the decreased birthrate to rock the foundations of the American hearthstone, and well, we found things were not so bad as had been printed. The national hearthstone is still firm. Now come the Government's figures showing the increase in divorces, and this time the American family is going all to pieces, headed straight for the proverbial bow-wows. Of course, no one will say that these divorce figures make pleasant reading; that they represent a deplorable state is conceded.....
The question in connection with this divorce evil is not whether the American Public will act, for that it can be depended on to do, but how will it act? Will it adjust the divorce laws and begin at the wrong end, or will it tighten the marriage laws and begin at the right end? This is not a time for wailing, but for good straight-forward thinking along right lines. And the more we think along the line of making marriage less easy, the nearer we will become to the real solution of the divorce law.
