Tag Archives: divorce

Upton Sinclair Calls Marriage Slavery and Ceremony a Farce

Annie Laurie

Oakland Tribune/January 30, 1909

Upton Sinclair says he’s sorry he’s married.

He said it right out loud in a calm, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

I read about the Robins people—the couple who don’t believe in marriage and who have decided to take the world Into their confidence and proclaim that they have never been married at all, and that they never intend to marry at all—not nobody, nowhere, at no time—all because they believe that modern marriage is a hideous mockery, and a horrible sin. So I went down to Mr. Sinclair’s hotel to see what he thought about the Robins and their views of the marriage question.

Hears Amazing Thing

Mr. Slnclair was pleasant enough to invite me to a most delightful vegetarian luncheon and then I sat there and listened, with eyebrows that I did my best to keep vertical, to all kinds of amazing things—mostly about marriage.

“These Rabins must be people of great courage and fine character,” said Mr. Sinclair. “It takes grit to be a pioneer. Of course, they are doing the right thing. I have never believed in marriage. Who could, and know any married people at all? But I wasn’t brave enough to live up to my convictions.

“When my wife and I fell in love with each other, we talked the whole marriage business over very conscientiously. We both of us hated the idea of being tied together by either a religious or a legal ceremony, and we tried to make up our minds to set the right kind of example to the world.

“But we know that Mrs. Sinclair’s father and mother would go raving crazy if we did what our conscience told us was right. So to ease their minds we let some one mumble a few words over us—and made them  happy.

Calls Ceremony “Farce”

“l wish now we had done as these Robins people have had the courage and the fortitude to do—lived together without the farce of a foolish and obsolete ceremony.

“The world would have been that much farther ahead on the road to progress.

“We were young and foolish then, and now we have seen the world and know a great many married people—so we are a good deal ashamed of being married ourselves.

“Why am I so prejudiced against marriage?

“Why shouldn’t I be prejudiced against it? You might as well ask me why I am so prejudiced against slavery—or against thievery—or if it comes to that, against murder either.

“Marriage in this day is nothing but legalized slavery; that’s the most polite word to call it, I fancy.

“The average married woman is bought just exactly as much as any horse or any dog is bought.

“She is absolutely dependent upon her husband for her food and clothes, and she marries him just to get the very best food and clothes that she can command in the market.

“What are all these balls and parties—but bargain sales?

“This lovely blonde for half a million, a little shop worn, going at half price.

This gorgeous brunette on the bargain counter today, $20,000 a year will buy her. That’s what it all means—this display and parade and music and feasting and flowers. Every woman with a daughter is a match-maker, and she is looking for bargains, too.

“Talk about a fire sale rush—you just watch a young man with a good income or good prospects of a good income at a party, and you’ll see what the word ‘rush’ means.

“Women will never marry for love and for love alone until they become economically independent.

Independent Women

“A woman wage-earner will not marry for a home, when it gets to be as swell to earn your own living as it is to have some man earn it for you.

“Marriage of today is worse than a farce; it is a hideous tragedy.

“How many happy married people do you know?”

“About one couple in ten thousand.

“There’s So and So, a dissipated, selfish wreck—his wife lives with him rather than to go out and earn her own living.

“I don’t like to have my wife associate with women who do such things. I consider it immoral to encourage such horrible immorality.

“There is Thus and So, a morbid egotist, absorbing his wife’s very vitality and fairly eating up her very soul.

“There is Johnson buying bis wife pretty clothes, dressing her like a doll and making love to every woman he meets.

“She knows it, and she knows that he knows that she knows he knows it—but what’s the difference. A pair of pendant earrings at the right time or a new chinchilla coat—and it’s all right.

“Marriage! Faugh!”

“Marriage—ough! It really isn’t a subject to be discussed at the table.”

“But if all these people you speak of were not married to each other, Mr. Sinclair, only just living together, without a ceremony, do you think they would be happier then?” I ventured.

“They wouldn’t live together,” said Mr. Sinclair. “When they got tired of each other they’d quit.”

“And find some one else?” I queried, timidly.

“Perhaps,” answered Mr. Sinclair, calmly.

“And then?” I breathed in diffident but determined tones.

“And then,” said Mr. Sinclair, firmly, “what then? Nothing matters so long as the human race progresses. It may come through pain and through sorrow and through humiliation and through martyrdom, the progression, but come it must, and before we can climb very high on the stairs of progress we have got to leave the old-fashioned marriage contract at the foot of the steps.”

I found my dazed and somewhat bewildered way down the hill to Market street and down Market street to the little vegetarian restaurant kept and run by the Robins, Mr.—may I call her for this once again?—Mrs. Robins.

Eyes That Dream

Mr. Robins is a pale little man with a high, broad forehead, and a pair of dark eyes that dream, and Mrs. Robins is rather an attractive woman of the Swiss type, with large blue eyes, black lashed, plenty of black hair, a sweet smile and a great deal of fresh and perfectly natural color.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Robins, showing me to a seat at a plain little table at the end of the plain little restaurant, “I am the woman you read about in the papers. We didn’t want it to get into the papers, but since it was in why, we’ll have to make the best of it.

“No, I never married Mr. Robins. Yes, I have been called his wife for five years. I do not believe In marriage.

“It is a cruel and wicked slavery. want to be free; I could not bear to tie myself by any ceremony to any man.”

To Remain Happy

Mr. Robins smiled gently across a somewhat crumpled tablecloth and said very softly, “We are not separating because we are unhappy.

“We are separating because we are happy—and we want to keep happy.”

“Yes,” nodded Mrs. Robins, her large blue eyes afire with what looked like intelligent Interest. “That’s the way to keep happy—to separate.

“We have never quarreled, and we intend to part so that we never will have quarrels.

“Too much companionship is the worst kind of slavery. I want to live my life my own way, and I want this man I have loved for five years and love now to live his life, his own way; that’s all there is to it. There is no mystery—nothing but plain common sense. I despise the average married woman. I look upon her as a poor drudge, bought and paid for by her clothes and board.

Would “Improve World”

“When there are no more such women as she in the world the world will come nearer to being fit for honest, self-respecting women to live in.

“No true woman can be a helpless parasite and keep even a pretense of self-respect. Some day the world will see this, and then there will be no more marriage and no more misery, stunted, half-developed lives.”

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Marriage Avoider Basks in the Miami Sun

Damon Runyon

Patriot News/December 18, 1937

Miami Beach, Florida, Dec. 17.- George Ade says if he had it all to do over again, he probably would get married.

This statement may be taken as in the nature of an important confession from the man who for many years ranked as perhaps the most eligible bachelor in the United States.

He was young, rich, healthy, handsome and famous in the days when his name generally led the list of the male matrimonial desirables of the land.

He was tall, slender, romantic looking. He was a celebrated writer of stories and plays. He was a nifty dresser. He had a fine background. He was the type that attracted attention. The ladies said “00-00” when he went by. He was everything you would think a gal would want in marriage.

Skillful or Lucky?

But Mr. Ade never married. It is conceivable that many a snare and pitfall of matrimonial intent was planted along his path of single blessedness as he journeyed through his twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and even sixties, yet he side-stepped them with amazing skill.

Other gentlemen who were unable to avoid the traps used to eye Mr. Ade’s unhampered ease, and freedom from double responsibilities, with great envy. Some said he was just plain lucky. Mr. Ade himself is not so sure about that as he pointed for the seventy-second year mark, which he will reach next February.

“It’s all right being a bachelor when you are a young bachelor,” he said to other day, “but it’s a tough life when you get to be an old bachelor and find yourself pretty much alone. You have to marry a club then for company. Yes, I guess if I had it all to do over again, and know what I know now, and could find somebody who would have me, I’d probably get married.”

We looked Mr. Ade up in his winter home on Miami Beach. He has lived for the past six winters in a modest little rented house that reflects none of the magnificence of his permanent home, which is a beautiful farm at Brook, Indiana. The number of the house is 1313, showing that Mr. Ade is not superstitious about thirteen, anyway.

Movies and Prize Fights

He lives there alone. He has a housekeeper and a chauffeur. He keeps up his writing, goes to all the movies, big, little, good, bad, or indifferent, and to the race track when the horses are running. He attends the local prize fights, and visits with rich neighbors on the beach from Chicago, like Mr. Johnny Hertz.

In general, Mr. Ade leads a fairly active life. His still luxuriant hair is snowy white. His once towering frame is but slightly stooped. He remains a fine figure of a man, and looks better now, physically, than at any time in the past several years.

Mr. Ade first rose to fame as one of the greatest humorists this country has ever produced when he was writing a daily column for a Chicago newspaper years ago. The column was called “Stories of the Streets and of the Town,” and it saw the birth of “Artie,” “Doc Horne,” “Pinky Marsh,” and “Fables in Slang.”

From Fables to Plays

The last were so enormously popular that Mr. Ade quit daily columning after seven years and did one “Fable” a week for a New York syndicate. That left him with a lot of time on his hands and he turned to writing plays. He wrote “The Sultan of Sulu,” “The College Widow,” “The County Chairman,” “The Fair Co-Ed,” and others, and made a raft of money.

That was when the newspapers used to talk about his matrimonial eligibility, and hook his name up with that of almost every gal he as much as looked at, including various theatrical stars, though these latter hook-ups were mainly the product of the genius of the press agents for the plays Mr. Ade wrote, and the author was just a defenseless bystander.

“But why did you never marry?” we asked.

“Well,” Mr. Ade said, with more levity than a serious subject like matrimony warrants, “in a time when I might have contemplated matrimony, a marriage license cost $2, and I never had the money. By the time I got the $2, I had lost the idea of marriage.

“Kindly be serious,” we said.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose I lived in hall bedrooms too long, and got too thoroughly undomesticated. On top of that, maybe no woman would have had me.”

We did not ask if he ever tried to find out. That would have been a little personal. Of course even now Mr. Ade cannot be considered utterly beyond matrimonial salvage, but we rather inferred that the prospect is somewhat remote, at least at the moment.

However, you never can tell what the Dade county climate will do to, or perhaps we should say for, a man.

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