1842 SPINSTERS PETITION FOR DIVORCE

Came across a wonderful petition by a bunch of spinsters circa 1842, railing against the church. It concerns the right to divorce but their church blasting is priceless. From the tone it sounds like all the good men were tied up in loveless marriages and these lonely 'spinsters' want laws changed to make divorce easier, so they can get their hands on a man. I have edited it for length, where you see "..." I have edited out either repetitions or wordy ramblings. I kept the best. Remeber now this is 1842! You go grrl!

THE HUMBLE PETITION OF THE SPINSTERS, TO THE LEGISLATURE OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, IN SESSION ASSEMBLED.

By HYPATIA, AMANUENSIS FOR THE SPINSTERS.

PETITION.

Christian Marriage is the enemy of the natural union of the sexes.

The humble Petition, and earnest cry and prayer of that moiety of the women in these dominions, who are usually designated SPINSTERS, to the Legislature of Great Britain and Ireland, in Session assembled;—

HUMBLY SHEWETH,

That although your petitioners, from the natural timidity of the sex, approach you on this trying occasion with diffidence and feelings of alarm, yet, as their case involves some of the most important and inalienable rights of deeply injured humanity, they are imboldened to lay before you their wrongs and grievances, which call aloud for your interference and redress.

With a melancholy retrospect of the past, and hopeless foreboding of the future, the youthful amongst your petitioners see in prospect, the long array and dreary waste of days they are destined to spend in that languishing and ungenial state of celibacy, to which their equally abused sisterhood were, from the same cause, doomed in former ages; and it is with grief and despair that they now behold the yearly increasing numbers of the forlorn, down to the present time, when they form nearly two-thirds of all the women in these realms, between the ages of fourteen and seventy years.

In the present perverted condition of society, where it is usual to establish laws and customs so far in opposition to reason, as to supplant every thing natural, the arts of dissimulation, as they regard concealment of inherent feelings and propensities, are instilled into the female mind as the most essential part of education: every instinctive emotion however innocent,—every impulse however connected with health, must, under an assumed placidity and acquiescence, be suppressed as the height of sin and wickedness, though the fatal resistance exposes her to the maladies attendant on all such violations of the principle of animal existence; whilst the salutary disregard of this carefully cultivated hypocrisy, subjects her to all the odium which false delicacy and unnatural religion can invent. But so intolerable has female wretchedness now become in what is called civilized society, that the free expression thereof, together with its lamentable cause, shall no longer be prevented or concealed by fashion's irrational tyranny; and, therefore, your petitioners, stimulated by an assurance becoming fearless virtue, at once declare that the sole cause of their untoward and isolated condition, is the all-blasting marriage laws now in operation, which, having been rendered indissoluble through ecclesiastical usurpation, are now become the dread of all men possessing sound reflection, by whom they are shunned as the most direful pestilence of the social system. From this fell cause alone, and not from any prudish perverseness on their part (as God knows), your petitioners are doomed to that cheerless state of singleness which prevents them from fulfilling, in a lawful manner, the intentions of genial Nature, a predicament of all others the most abhorrent to that power.

Grounding their arguments on the palpable truths displayed both by fact and analogy, throughout the whole animal world; and denouncing all such conventional laws as have been palmed upon the credulity of society, under the false pretence of commands emanating from heaven, ... if the principles, propensities, and necessities, of the human species were duly considered, ... lessons of wisdom might be derived from the wise and faultless association of all other animals, amongst whom the union of the sexes is perfect, solely because it is not perpetual; where fidelity during frequently renewed marriage is inviolable,—the gallantry of the male towards the female admirable, and separation in due time mutually assented to, because highly proper and salutary. These are the dictates which spring from the innate principle, and constitutional elements of every thing that has life; but which, in the instance of man, have been thwarted and outraged by the atrocious laws of Christian matrimony; whereby silly and deluded mortals, in the sacrifice of their dearest liberty, have made themselves the outcasts of Nature; ... love constitutes the chief solace and enjoyment of all animals, man alone excepted, to him only, as the well-merited consequence of the gross and revolting violations of the benevolent impulse, it brings degradation and misery; for whenever the familiar intercourse of marriage ceases to be cemented by reciprocal affection, it becomes not only genuine prostitution, but the cause of it wherever it exists; all seduction being induced either by marriage or the dread of it. To the perpetuity of this tie alone, which is utterly abhorred by the universal mother of all existence, is to be attributed the thousand snares laid for female seduction, and its woful train of miseries; but these pass unpitied, and even unheeded, in this Christian country of boasted humanity.

When mankind are taught from infancy, to bend under the delusion of supernatural hopes and fears, and through, fallacious promises of another world, to give up their felicity in this, they are very easily led to trample upon all the rights and principles of their nature. When reduced to this abject state, it has ever been the wicked policy of corrupt legislators, in the nations of Christendom, to found their laws and institutions, not upon these principles and rights, though they alone form the proper basis of all social order and morality; but, on the contrary, to crush them, by taking into partnership the priesthoods of the various superstitions, pampering and abetting them in their incessant guileful practices against human liberty; and allowing them to usurp a mischievous interference and control in affairs purely civil; and the union of the sexes being unquestionably of that description, all agency or influence of priests should be wholly excluded in all its concerns and relations. Every particular marriage ought to be as different as any other species of bargain or contract; and as for the inconsistent absurdity of supposing, that parties who have the right to enter into this contract, at their mutual will and pleasure, have not an equal right to dissolve it for their reciprocal comfort and convenience, it is too hostile to human happiness to originate any where but in the Pandemonium of theological tyranny. To increase the gains and power of this all-pervading evil, the expedient was invented of calling down from heaven a commission, authorizing it to mix its life-lasting alloy in the simple union of the sexes, and to confound the civil contract with what is called a sacrament, or preternatural obligation, taken before a divine tribunal, as is ridiculously imagined, and not dissolvable but in death, or through the commission of a certain crime, which is thereby greatly promoted. Thus, by sacerdotal trammels, which are intrinsically grievous and degrading, has matrimony been rendered a snare, of all others the most sorrowful.

Your petitioners having shown that the evils they contemplate arise from a source inherently depraved,... solely owing to the perpetual gall of that yoke, which was first forged by the Christian priesthood, whose influence in this, as in every other case of their interference in social affairs, hath produced effects the most inimical to human welfare. Laws tainted by the noxious leaven of supernaturalism, (and what law have we that is not so tainted?) the property of which is to vitiate every thing in this fair world, and promulgated in times of ignorance, in combination with despotic aristocracies, will necessarily partake more of feudal savageness, and superstitious thraldom, than of civilization; their object being the mental and bodily slavery of the people—not humanity. But in the particular instance of the existing marriage law, love, which disdains, all constraint, and whose life and essence is freedom, is so flagrantly outraged at the sacrilegious attempt to fix his almighty power by vain and unearthly compulsion,...are horror-struck at a connexion so indissoluble; and which, instead of being a state of peaceful union, is generally one of hostility to its victims. The experienced in the common-place strife of matrimonial warfare, talk of it as being "only the ordinary quarrels between man and wife," whom pernicious custom, as if seeking deadly mischief, has pent up in the same apartment, continually exposing the belligerants to daily and hourly collision, after every vestige of mutual feeling or sympathy has been utterly destroyed... and there hath been generated, a cancerous mental poison of such exquisite subtilty, as to cause a pain far exceeding any other human suffering, and which can be borne only by wo-begone minds already broken down by the abject slavery it produces. This is the state that exhibits the most dismal portraiture of human misery.

Your petitioners will venture an appeal; even to your own domestic experience, whether disgust and aversion be not too generally the result of matrimony; owing to incompatibility of humour and temper (these being commonly as different as are the sexes); and whether time, instead of healing the wounds laid open by mutual reproaches, does not increase their virulence daily by fresh recriminations and injuries? Alas! the two persons turned into one by the presumptuous priest, soon find that they not only continue to be two still, but that they are diametrically opposed to each other; and then follow through life those well-known clouds and storms, which, though familiar in every day's experience, baffle all description; whilst the frightful list of progeny engendered in this procreative nest of nuptial discord, are—repentance, melancholy, jealousy, animosity, poverty, disgust, despair, &c., and the frequent catastrophe is, that one or other of the miserable victims, labouring under the jugum calamitosum, commits the greatest of all crimes, as the only available means of effecting that necessary separation which an inhuman law has prohibited. ... Now, so long as the yoke of matrimony shall continue to be fastened on by priests, and require, as they say, the perpetual clinch of some personage residing beyond the clouds, your petitioners feel themselves bound in conscience, to excuse these too well-founded fears in the prudent portion of the male sex, who cannot shut their eyes to the glaring fact, that a vast majority of the ill-fated beings whose necks have been so subjected, have found, not only the extinction of sacred liberty, but the sad weight and variety of its other miseries. The heart of man (aye, and of woman too) delights in freedom; even the idea of constraint is grievous; and every attempt to confine it by violence, makes it spurn even that object which would have been its choice if left at liberty.

"Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wing, and in a moment flies."

Against the perpetuity of marriage, the authority of the greatest and most enlightened minds may be quoted :—Milton says, "indisposition, unfitness, or contrary humours, proceeding from any unchangeable cause in Nature hindering, and always likely to hinder, the main ends and benefits of conjugal society, peace and delight, are greater reasons of divorce than adultery or natural frigidity."... In the present baneful system, if genuine love, THAT ONE CORDIAL IN THIS MELANCHOLY VALE, exists previous to marriage, that very act crushes it in the bud...; the free-born mind shrinks aghast at the absurd impossibilities enjoined by the terms of the irrevocable bond, which is thus imposed by our traffickers in celestial statute laws. But as no such juggling pretences can render this obligation sacred, longer than it contributes to the comfort of the parties, it is virtually and properly cancelled when its evils become greater than its benefits; therefore the facility of separation is the more indispensable... All men in Christian wedlock are in some measure shorn of their native dignity, and to a certain degree in bondage; women of every description whatsoever are notoriously slaves; from which state there can be no efficient emancipation, whilst any action committed by them shall carry more odium, and have effects more prejudicial to their reputation and welfare, than the commission of the same action has upon those of men. Your Petitioners therefore repeat, that although they are not slaves to the male sex, yet all are decidedly so to pernicious laws, usages, and institutions, palmed upon society in times of ignorance, by Aristocratic Despotism, Priestcraft & Co., as so many state devices to perpetuate ignorance and slavery. From this corrupt fountain hath the nuptial cup been poisoned; and, as if putting the final barrier against human felicity, love, without marriage, has been branded and denounced as a deadly sin; and as there is no equivalent under the sun, the professional enemies of Nature promise atonement in their own fanciful regions, for this fatal privation, which has murdered millions of millions of the female sex;... Laws proceeding from such vicious conventions, may thus violate the universal order of things; and leave to deluded man not a thousandth part of the happiness he is capable of enjoying; but as superlative power cannot be suppressed, all such impious infringements will for ever return upon the violators.

...

...

After a youthful training of this kind, in the school of false notions and erroneous views, where the only visible effect of an expensive education is to disqualify her for the domestic utilities, and to keep her so wholly ignorant of herself and of the world, that she is totally unprepared to meet the sad vicissitudes which may await her in life's calamitous journey, what has the "happy man" to expect in his wedded dame? Not the domestic virtues certainly. ... But in lieu thereof, he may expect strong self-will, with an undisguised contempt for every thing in the shape of that due deference and subservience—that winning complaisance ..., establishes her control over his household, his purse, and, as far as possible, even over his mind itself, which, in most instances, becomes feminized and shorn of its masculine energy :— the subdued tone and look, characterize the lion of the cage,—now no longer the high-minded free lion of the desart. In short, when once the poor man is CAUGHT, he is no longer suffered to be altogether himself; he must undergo a fresh moulding—be rendered tame—learn not only to bear, but to show respect for conversation however puerile and trifling; but above all, to be perfectly pliant and passive to every thing around him; whilst the tyranny of custom and laws founded upon superstition, justify the unnatural dominion.

...

In venturing to draw so frightful a picture of wedlock's mass of evil, and consequent miseries, your petitioners, though determined no longer to hug the theological viper that stings them, are actuated by no unrestrained humour or levity of disposition; they pray not for those accommodating liberties which were enjoyed of old by the Spartan ladies; nor would they have the ideal republic of Plato realized, wherein marriage would have been entirely abolished; nor do they approve St. Paul's plan to "defraud," by borrowing wives occasionally, though "it be with consent for a time;" neither are they advocates for the still greater licentiousness of Zeno, who asserted that women ought to be altogether unrestrained in their amours, that their children might be equally dear to all men, ... Yet any one of all these modes is infinitely preferable to Christian matrimony, which your petitioners have shown to be the most woful trap that was ever set for human liberty. But so deep-rooted is the dissimulation and falsehood which priestcraft, and its offspring of bad laws and customs, have diffused through all ranks of society, that the truths thus honestly laid bare before you, by removing the veil of hypocrisy, will not only be denied by the colleagued upholders of church and state abuses, but by a vast majority even of those who, from their long experience in connubial miseries, are the most fully convinced of their sad reality.

...

First. — As the innovation creating inequality of rights and liberties between the sexes, ... which are alike the birthright of all the human race, and of which they have been deprived as aforesaid, may be legally restored to them. That, after having attained the age specified by law, they may, under all circumstances, be rendered as capable of holding, in their own right, every species of property, and to all intents and purposes of using and bequeathing the same, in virtue of the same rights and privileges as those held and enjoyed by the male sex; and that the simple casualty of living under the social protection of a husband for the time being, shall in nowise weaken or alter this absolute right of property.

Secondly. — That the church-corrupted, and highly immoral laws of marriage, which now vitiate the union of the sexes, may be wholly abrogated. That new institutions and regulations may be formed, limiting the duration of that purely civil contract, so as to be entirely subject to the mutual inclination, convenience, and well-being of the parties concerned; and that these laws may, in all respects, be consonant with the principles, wants, and necessities of human nature; these being the only proper foundation on which to establish all laws affecting the moral government of society.

Thirdly. — As it is only a fair deduction drawn from experience in the affairs of mankind, that all the doctrines of supernaturalism, by whom or whensoever propagated, have never had any other operation than that of strangling the social rights, and poisoning all the choicest sweets of human life; your petitioners most earnestly implore that in the formation and ministration of the future laws, all ecclesiastical influence, interference, or control in any way whatever, may be wholly excluded.

Fourthly. — Having shown the absurd inconsistency which cruelly prevents the separation of persons whose couples alone render them wretched, and by which two people are lost to the community, who might otherwise be useful, your petitioners pray, that all parties who have the civil right to enter into a marriage contract, at their own discretion, may have the equal right preserved to them of dissolving the same, for their reciprocal comfort and convenience, or at the instance of either party, and subject only to such moral and political regulations as, in your wisdom, you shall deem beneficial for the protection and education of the offspring, and for the general interests of society.

And your petitioners, as in duty bound, &c. &c.



(Signed) HYPATIA,

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