Of course, every one knows that marriage is a legal contract; but whom does it bind? Certainly not the woman, nor any woman in America. For she may easily free herself and even divorce and penalize her husband if she is dissatisfied either with him or his earnings; or she may evade all the obligations she is supposed to meet, almost always with absolute impunity.
Whatever she may do or leave undone in the marriage relation, if it but be with sufficient pretense and discretion, in America, at least, the world and the courts absolve her from all blame.
- If she be discreet, she may entertain lovers galore; she may refuse to perform any of the theoretical duties of the home; she may refuse to bear children or to surrender to her husband, without censure, and often without the knowledge of the world. If she be addicted to drunkenness, people will divine that her husband must have treated her brutally; if she be seen with other men, folks suspect that he neglects her.
- If her husband seeks satisfaction for his desires elsewhere, she may divorce him and secure alimony; if he deserts her the law will return him to her side, if it can find him. If he fails to bring home the wherewithall to provide for her, she may have him sent to jail. If she discovers that he is getting the affection and the sex life which she has denied him, outside of his home, and if she buys a revolver and murders him in cold blood, the jury will exonerate her.
- If a wife deserts her husband and her children, the law does not make her a criminal; for wife abandonment, the husband is held criminally liable.
No matter what the offense of the woman, custom and public opinion demand that every "decent" man permit his wife to accuse him on "just grounds" and to secure the divorce and call on the law to force him to pay her alimony for the rest of their natural lives.
No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation, legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. She has only to say that he "deceived her."
A husband may become crippled or invalided and there is no law even suggesting that it is the duty of his wife to support him; most communities would lynch a man who neglected a sick or helpless wife, and the law would certainly deal most harshly with him. The law throws no safeguards about the man, to protect him against his wife's failure to live up to her theoretical marital obligations, to protect him when he is ill, or in the enjoyment of separate maintenance, alimony, or against non-support or abandonment.
The laws today protect the owners of property and the economically powerful. The more economic power a group, or a class, or a sex possesses, the more the state throws the mantle of its protective laws about it. Women are owners of a commodity for which men are buyers or barterers, and our modern laws protect woman at the expense of man.
Women As Sex Vendors Or Why Women Are Conservative (Being A View Of The Economic Status Of Woman) By R. B. Tobias And Mary E. Marcy