A Domestic Siege in Tacoma
A man files for divorce, claiming his wife and nine stepchildren waged a campaign of harassment, including teapot-throwing.
Tacoma, June 10.—A wife who threatened him with the teapot and nine stepchildren who called him vile names completely destroyed the happiness of Andrew Black, according to the story in a complaint he filed in a divorce suit today against Margaret Black. The couple were married at Portland in September, 1894. Two months after marriage, so the complaint alleges, Mrs. Black informed her husband that her nine children by her former husband did not like Mr. Black, and that he must leave. He stayed. The children then, he claims, began to shower indignities upon him, and his wife, too, threatened to throw the teapot at him. As a further cause of complaint, Black alleges she talked about him to the neighbors. Finally, she and her nine children left him, September 1, and he has not seen her since.
“A wife who threatened him with the teapot and nine stepchildren who called him vile names completely destroyed the happiness of Andrew Black.”
Divorce filings in the 1890s often served as public records of private misery, providing a rare, albeit one-sided, glimpse into the domestic tensions of the era. The vivid detail of the 'teapot' threat captures the specific, often petty, grievances that defined legal separations of the time.
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