Henry James. Love, Marriage, and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1853.
By mid-century divorce was on the rise in the states that allowed it, and Connecticut alone granted over 2,000 divorces during the 1850s. The liberalization of divorce laws also prompted public debate about the relative merits of marriage and the particular and often oppressive conditions to which women were subjected, including dependence on abusive or neglectful husbands and having to relinquish their rights to property. This pamphlet, printed in over 50,000 copies, presents an extended debate which first appeared in the New York Tribune. The participants in the debate were three prominent men. The Tribune’s editor, Horace Greeley, argued for “indissoluble marriage.” Henry James, Sr., taking the middle ground, advocated for a more liberal divorce law. Provocatively, radical Stephen Pearl Andrews likened marriage to prostitution, and hoped for a time when a woman could “belong to herself and not to a husband.”
