LIFE, No. 2: Women in Chains

More than any other bit of social commentary the 1906 editors of LIFE magazine keep returning to the issue of divorce and remarriage.

Now I have no idea whether this truly was a heated debate in the summer, autumn, and winter of that year. Certainly if the editors are to be believed the American wife was little more than a chattel slave six years into the new century. The theme of the woman chained to a wastrel husband, or a lecher, or a brute turns up again and again, whether in graphic form:

On the editorial page, or, here, both terribly and delightfully, in verse:

I really can't tease you with just a single page from this beauty. So here is "In re Remarriage" from the LIFE poetry series Ditties on Divorce;

Bill Baker bought a thoroughbred
And hitched her to a cart;
He overworked, and underfed,
And broke the poor beast's heart.

The Rev. Dr. Boner¹ ran
To the S.P.C.A.
And made them send around a man
To take the horse away.

Bill Baker next was roundly fined;
They sold his trembling mare
To Mr. Brown, the good, the kind,
Who promised gentle care.

Now this Bill Baker had a wife
Who saw, with much remorse,
The she'd endured a harder life
Than had Bill Baker's horse.

She'd been his serf for years and years -
He sought elsewhere his pleasure;
He made her weep, then cursed her tears,
And beat her for good measure.

So now she called on Dr. Boner²
And told him of her plan:
"You found our mare another owner,
Get me another man."

The preacher grew aghast, aghaster;
He cried, "Are you insane?
How dare you thus address your pastor?
Oh, have I praught³ in vain?"

"I've thundered till my throat was hoarse
At justice's miscarriage.
The world's worst evil is DIVORCE,
Except one worse - REMARRIAGE."

"God chastens whom He loveth well,
You husband does the same.
If he's unfaithful - who can tell?
Perhaps you are to blame."

"Go home and pray, and if Bill smites,
Just turn the other cheek.
Preserve the best of Woman's Rights -
The right of being weak."

"And then if Bill does not repent
After a year's probation,
Perhaps we'll graciously consent
To legal separation."

"But howsoever you're estranged,
Think twice before you travel;
Our wedding goods are not exchanged,
However they unravel."

"At least, unless the Lord at last
Should summon Bill above;
Then, if you also have not passed,
You're allowed another love."

"In fact, as fast as husbands die,
As long as you've endurance;
But while one lives, it won't apply;
It's something like insurance."

"Body-and-soul, you are Bill Baker's
On this side of the tomb.
It's not my job, but an undertaker's
To mitigate your doom."

These words the woman did astound.
She gasped, "Is this religion?
To trap the rabbit for the hound?
To snare and cage the pigeon?"

"I ask for food, you offer a stone.
If I leave his hateful bed,
You send me out in the dark alone,
Childless, unloved, unfed."

"In barren travail's discontent,
Not widow, maid, nor wife,
Such liberty were banishment;
The Wandering Jew's free life."

"What crime have I done, thus bereft?
Does Heaven so abhor it.
That first I must endure the theft,
And then do penance for it?"

"Forbid the divorcee remarry?
Why not take just one more step,
And force the wretch to hari-kari
Upon her husband's doorstep?"

"Why did you rescue our poor mare
Before poor Bill was dead?
Must I go homeless, just because
I'm not a quadruped?"

The parson stammered, "Can truth be hammered
Into a woman's brains? -
However spouses grow unenamored,
The sacrament remains!"

"As for the horse - well, it's a horse,
A woman's but a woman;
The devil's self-devised divorce,
Remarriage is inhuman."

"Good-day, madame!" - accenting "dame"
The visit to determine -
He gave the door a dulcet slam,
And went back to his sermon.

~ John Lomax

¹Based on the lack of actual humor visible either elsewhere in the verse or the illustrations accompanying it I have to assume that Mr. Lomax was either unaware of the childish jape implied by his fictional clergyman's name or was some sort of Ragtime Era zen master of deadpan humor.

²OK, I think have to concede it; Lomax just didn't get the joke here.

³Praught caught me cackhanded; WTF? But apparently the word was used sparingly as the past-tense form of the verb "preach" instead of "preached" (as "taught" is for "teach") but was never accepted; its use here smacks to me of a rather pathetic attempt at erudition from the inventor of the Rev. Dr. Boner.

A heartrending little vignette, isn't it? I think that was the idea.

The odd thing about all of this hoo-raw is that I simply can't find any source of controversy or discussion of the issue of divorce and remarriage for this period outside of LIFE magazine. Try it yourself; Google any of these subjects and you'll find all sort of recent tracts on the subject from the usual suspects - it seems comical and sad that after all these years there are still bible-beaters and Christopaths (and orthodox Jews and docrinaire Muslims...) fighting this rearguard action.

But as a remarried divorcee myself, I may be a trifle biased on the subject, yeah?

LIFE, No. 1: Up from the bins

It's been a dreary, rainy sort of weekend, and we've been forced to some pretty dire expedients to entertain ourselves.

That included a revisit to "The Bins".

And y'know, the odd thing is that the Bins just didn't seem quite as nasty and filthy as it had when we were there in 2009. I'm not sure if that says something more about the Bins, or about our falling standards of hygiene over the past three years.

Mojo picked up some fairly clean clothing, the kiddos got some sort of toy car apparatus, and I picked up some books, including this thing:

I picked it up because it was an oddity, some sort of collected magazine or journal articles from the first decade of the last century. I enjoy the late Victorian and Edwardian periodicals as art as much as anything, but this looked to be something a little bit more and so it was.

Now if you're old enough - and, frankly, if you're younger than about forty you probably might not remember it - you might remember the glossy picture magazine published with the big red rectangle in the upper left corner with the word LIFE inside it. Before Cosmo, before Vanity Fair, Atlantic, before all the other glossy picture mags, there was LIFE.

In other words, if you're my age or older you might remember a magazine on the checkout stand - and LIFE was still on the supermarket stands when I was a kid, although in the mid-Sixties the picture on the cover was often in color - looking something like this:

LIFE magazine might well have been the iconic periodical in the nation between the Thirties and the Sixties, that is, until the decline of periodical literature in general.

It was the pioneer of "photojournalism" that has become the standard of the 21st Century; pictures supported, and often barely, by words rather than the pictures as the accessory to text as had been the norm up to that point.

But what I had fished out of the blue bin was something else again.

It was a collection - Volume XLVIII, containing July to December 1906 - of the "old" LIFE magazine, the pre-Luce, pre-Thirties version that owed its style and content more to the humor and literary magazines of the 19th Century like Puck or the even older illustrated newspapers like Frank Leslie's than the glossy picture magazine that Henry Luce made of it.

It described itself with the following:

"We wish to have some fun in this paper... We shall try to domesticate as much as possible of the casual cheerfulness that is drifting about in an unfriendly world... We shall have something to say about religion, about politics, fashion, society, literature, the stage, the stock exchange, and the police station, and we will speak out what is in our mind as fairly, as truthfully, and as decently as we know how."

Well.

The editors of LIFE had...well, let's just say they had an interesting idea of fun. The pages of the collection are full of all sorts of notions, some of them curiously modern again after 106 years, some of them as archaic as Linear B and almost as incomprehensible.

One of the most fascinating things about this volume is to read about the events of 1906 not as history but as current events. Here's the editorial page for the August 9, 1906 edition of LIFE:

"It is to hold one's breath over Russia, except that her disease is going to run so long a course that it is more convenient for us to watch it to keep on breathing. Old times at this writing are resumed, the Duma being discharged and the familiar apparatus of repression in full operation. The condition of all Russia, so far as heard from, is now such that any prudent person if offered the choice of Russia or Chicago as a place of residence for his family, would be constrained for the time being to choose Chicago."

The editorialist goes on to opine

"Accordingly, the discharge of the Duma has seemed...certain to pospone the organization of Russia's governmental forces and likely to bring on revolution."

How 'bout that? I wonder if the writer lived to know how right he was...

But some of the articles are...well, to a 21st Century reader just bizarre, and shine a rather revealing light into the interior of the heads of the sorts of men who published, and the sorts who read, this sort of magazine in 1906.

Here's a short piece from the same issue entitled One At A Time:

"Women do not mass as well as men do. They lose by aggregation. A street-car full of women makes walking seem attractive. A regiment of men is pleasing. A regiment of women would be disturbing. So there are some flowers that, although individually charming, do no bunch well. Taken in large groups, women are objectionable. It is as individuals or in small squads that they are so incomparably interesting."

I'm not sure that the editor shouldn't have titled the thing A Monstrous Regimen of Women; certainly both seem animated by the same spirit.

At any rate, this volume so tickled me that over the next several months you will encounter here more of the collected insight and wisdom of 1906. There's no escaping it; this odd little volume of forgotten magazines has become one of my enthusiasms and this blog is the uncollated repository for my enthusiasms. You might as well hope for a Republican to stop talking about tax cuts.

Well, one could hope.

For, as the editors of LIFE themselves proclaimed back in the day, "Where there's LIFE, there's hope."