University of Virginia Library

Will It Increase Divorce?

Full suffrage was granted to the women of Wyoming in 1869. During
the twenty years from 1870 to 1890, divorce in the United States
at large increased about three times as fast as the population. In the
group of Western States, omitting Wyoming, it increased nearly four
times as fast as the population. In Wyoming it increased only about
half as fast as the population. "An ounce of experiment is worth a
ton of theory."

Rev. Francis Miner Moody, Secretary of the California Commission
working to secure a uniform divorce law throughout the United
States, published in the Woman Voter of February, 1913, an article
showing by actual statistics that every state which has had equal
suffrage for a considerable number of years has declined markedly in
its divorce rate as compared with the rest of the country. He points
out that in Colorado the drop was so great as to be "astonishing."

Just before Colorado granted equal suffrage, in 1891 and 1892, its
average number of divorces per year was 937. For the three years
immediately following the bestowal of equal suffrage—1894, 1895, and
1896—the average number of divorces per year was only 517.

A father sometimes turns his son out of doors for voting the wrong
ticket, but among American men this is rare. Where such a case
does arise, it is to be met by educating the domestic despot, not by
disfranchising all the members of the family but one. A couple who
are sensible and good-tempered will not quarrel if they are once in
a while unable to think alike about politics. A couple who are not
sensible and good-tempered are sure to quarrel anyway—if not about
politics, then about something else.