The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life

MRS. Heywood was arranging the drawingroom for an evening At Home, dusting the mantelshelf and some of the ornaments with a little hand broom. There were refreshments on a side...

In the drawing-room of a flat in Intellectual Mansions, S. W., there was an air of quietude and peace. No one would have imagined for a moment that the atmosphere was charged wi...

Herbert Heywood was in the depths of an arm-chair reading the paper. Mrs. Heywood was on the other side of the fireplace with a book on her lap. But she was dozing over it, and...

There is another way, and it has many doors. It is religion. Many of these women “take to religion” as they take to the suffrage movement, and find the same emotional excitement...

In the fifth and sixth years they have settled down to the jog-trot of the married life. Not yet do they see the shadow of the Eighth Year looming ahead. They have faced the rea...

It was Sir Francis Jeune, afterwards Lord St. Helier, and President of the Divorce Court, who first called attention to the strange significance of the Eighth Year of married li...

Thousands, and tens of thousands of women who pass through the Eighth Year, not unscathed, find another way out. They are finding it now through this new femininist movement whi...

When the woman has once taken flight, or is hesitating before taking her flight, in the Eighth Year, it is an almost hopeless business for the husband to call her back. Whenever...

One way of escape is through the door of the Divorce Court. Sir Francis Jeune, when he was President of the Divorce Court, saw before him many of these escaping women, and he no...

Besides, the husband does not like it. He discourages religion, except in homoeopathic doses, taken by way of a little tonic, as one goes to the theatre for a pick-me-up. As he...

In some cases, indeed in many cases, the presence of an “outsider” adds to the unhappiness of the wife and divides her still more from her husband. It is the presence of the mot...

I_t is the Eighth Year_. The wife does not know the significance of that. The husband goes on his way without seeing the ghosts that have invaded his little household. He is too...

Snobbishness is one of the causes which lead to the Eighth Year, and not the least among them. It is an essentially middle-class snobbishness, and has grown up, like a fungus gr...

It is the seventh year. The wife is still doing exactly what she did in the fifth and sixth years. Her daily routine is exactly the same. Except that she can afford extra little...

It is in the third and fourth year that they begin to find each other out. The bright fires of their passion have died down, burning with a fitful glow, burning low. Until then...

If only those idle women would find some good work to do the Eighth Year would lose its terrors. And there is so much good work to do if they would only lay their hands to it! I...