This Act came in the very fulness of time. Everybody was tired and altogether dissatisfied with the old and ineffectual plan of sending brutal husbands to prison. This feeling arose not from sympathy with brutal husbands, but from pity to ill-treated wives, for it was recognized that sending brutal husbands to prison only made matters worse. Briefly, the Act empowered married women who had persistently cruel husbands to leave them, and having left them, to apply to the magistrates for a separation and maintenance order, which magistrates were empowered to grant when persistent cruelty was proved.
Police-courts then became practically divorce-courts for the poor, for thousands of women have claimed and obtained these separation orders. It seems just, and I have no hesitation in saying it is right, whatever may be the consequences, that decent suffering women whose agony has been long drawn out should be protected from and delivered out of the power of human brutes. But in a community like ours we are bound to have an eye to the consequences.
Women very soon found that it was much easier to get separation than it was to get maintenance. However modest the weekly amount ordered--and to my mind magistrates were very lenient in this respect--comparatively few of the discarded husbands paid the amounts ordered: some few paid irregularly, the majority paid nothing. The "other woman" became an important factor, and the money that should have gone to the support of the legal wife and legitimate children went to her and to illegitimate children. Such fellows were, then, in straits. If they left the "other woman," affiliation orders loomed over them; if they did not pay their legalized wives, they might be sent to prison. Some men I know found this the easiest way of paying their wives "maintenance," for they would go cheerfully to prison, and when released would promptly start on the task of again accumulating arrears.
Undoubtedly very many women were much better off apart from their husbands--at any rate, they had some peace--but mostly they lived lives of unremitting toil and partial, if not actual, starvation. On the whole, this Act, which was quite necessary and inspired by good intentions, has not proved satisfactory. But married men began to ask, "Why cannot we have separation orders against habitually drunken wives?"