A WIFE’S VALUE.

MARRIAGE PARTNERSHIP.

BY A WOMAN.

Mr. Justice Mccardie has laid down this week the general principle that the value of a wife is materially affected by the fact that she assists in a business and by her capacity in the household. The learned judge has no doubt interpreted the law as it touches proceedings for divorce with that accuracy that we expect from the Bench. He was delivering his considered and reserved judgment in respect of half-a-dozen divorce cases in which claims for damages had been put forward, and he took the opportunity of making a general survey of British legislation on this subject. “The law had ever,” he remarked, “regarded the sanctity of married life as a matter of grave moment,” and in the question of damages the old idea was that the fear of having to pay them might act as a deterrent to an intending evil-doer.

From the woman’s point of view the outstanding interest of this judgment lies in the prominence assigned to the position of the husband, and the comparative unimportance of the wife. The underlying basis of all claims to damages were bluntly stated as: 1. The value of the wife to the husband. 2. The proper compensation to the husband for the injury to his feelings, the blow to his marital honour, and the serious hurt to matrimonial and family life. But there is no allusion to the value of a husband to a wife, no suggestion that a woman’s faith and her position in the home can be affected. Yet the position of nine-tenths of the women whose husbands have left them would be far worse than that of a man when the wife had failed him.

What is the lot of the children who have to be brought up by a wronged and slighted wife? As the law now stands, it is extremely doubtful whether a wife can claim any redress against another woman who undermines her husband’s affections for her. The man has certain claims against the man who lures away his wife; the woman has not the corresponding right against the unscrupulous siren who may has be possessed of independent means of her own.

“MAN-MADE LAW.”

It was always an offence in the eyes of the militant suffragists that women should be called upon to obey laws that they had no part in making. In this country we have consistently recognised both in theory and practice that “freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent,” and in due course the woman’s vote will make itself felt, especially in the direction of equality of the matrimonial status and the guardianship of the children. No one can deny that under existing conditions the wife is the inferior partner before the law in the marriage contract, and it is a pitiful and humiliating story how women have slowly, painfully, often amid jibes and misunderstanding, gained a point here, a concession there, which has advanced them a little from that primitive principle that the wife is merely a chattel of the husband. It was a theory that good women tried to accept in days when they were taught that their attitude should be that of meekness and submission, but there have always been those in whose hearts rankled the sense of inequality and wrong.