The Revolver in the Parlor: A Grocer's Case for Divorce
Threats to shoot him, a revolver produced in a rage, a locked door with mother and child inside — a Seattle grocer's complaint laid out what "cruel treatment" had to look like in 1895.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A Seattle grocer filed his complaint in the superior court yesterday praying for a divorce on the ground of cruel treatment, including threats to shoot him.
The two were married July 21, 1892, and have a child about fifteen months old. He says the wife has about $5,000 worth of property and he has none whatever.
She has been guilty of cruel treatment, abuse and profane, violent and abusive language toward him; she has an ungovernable temper and has shown a cruel and heartless disposition toward him. In November, 1893, while in a rage, among other things, she pointed a revolver at him and threatened to make a widow of her.
In January, 1894, he says, she interrupted him at a place of business and abused him publicly. In October, 1894, she varied the monotony of the household by locking herself and child in a room and threatening to kill herself and kill her child during the night. During the same month she came to his place of business and abused him in a public manner.
Patience has ceased to be a virtue with him, and he now wants the court to relieve him of the matrimonial bond.
“"Patience has ceased to be a virtue with him, and he now wants the court to relieve him of the matrimonial bond."”
In 1895 a Washington divorce had to be built on proved fault, so a complainant catalogued every scene — the raised revolver, the locked room, the public humiliation at the shop — as evidence. It is an uncomfortable, one-sided document: the wife's account is nowhere in the record. Washington later became one of the first states to adopt no-fault dissolution in 1973, in part because cases like this one turned private misery into a performance for the court.
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