Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/March 27, 1907

Poor, pretty, proud, heartbroken little Cora Wrlght and her pitiful baby daughter were found dead in their wretched home in Denver the other day.

Benjamin Wright is charged with the murder of his wife and child.

And now comes Mrs. Wright’s heartbroken sister, from half across the continent to tell in court the old, old story we hear so miserably often these days, the “I told you so” story of neglect and indifference and cruelty and misery only half concealed.

“Papa told Cora that he would give her all the money she needed to take care of her and the baby if she would come home and leave the man who was ill-treating her so,” said one of the sisters in an interview yesterday. “But the poor, foolish, little wife would not listen to her father and turned a deaf ear to her friends, and stayed with the man who, whether he be a murderer or not, made her wretchedly unhappy.”

I wonder why?

I wonder what comfort she found In living with a man who showed her so plainly that he was tired of her, and tired of the little girl and tired of the whole idea of simple domestic life with a loving, simple-hearted woman?

Loyalty, they call it, these poor little women who cling to unworthy husbands.

I wonder if it’s worthwhile, that sort of loyalty?

I wonder if little helpless, dependent children have no rights to be respected. Does their happiness amount to nothing?

Did you ever see a child who lived with quarreling, unhappy parents who was happy?

I never did.

I believe I could look up and down a crowded car this very day and pick out just by their looks the children whose parents are living happily together.

There is nothing so terrible in the world as the look of cowed apprehension on the face of a little child who is born and brought up in an unhappy home. I would rather take my children and bring them up in one room, where there was peace and contentment, than live with them in a palace with misery peering in at the door. Children are strangely sympathetic little creatures. They feel what is in the air, though they cannot understand it. I wonder if it’s right to bring up a little child in an atmosphere of jarring inharmony.

I wonder what a woman who sticks to a man after she has found him to be absolutely unworthy does it for? Does she think she is helping him any? Does she imagine that her presence, the presence which irritates him and eggs him on to do his work, is anything but a detriment and a drawback to any possible hope of improvement in his character?

I wonder what the people who do not believe in a divorce think when they read of such a case as this Wright affair?

“Until death do us part,” the marriage ceremony says, but how about the marriage which invites death, a hideously cruel and untimely death, to come into the home?

If poor little Mrs. Wright had left her husband when he began to show her that he hated her and her baby, she might have been alive and happy and useful today. I wonder If her little span of loyalty was worth the price she paid for it?