Finally the frustrated, but ever polite proprietor ejects the women and their reptiles: “Ladies, your pet has caused a dreadful disturbance in this house,” he says. Some of the stories Mary told were clearly satire, most obviously the tale of the “alligator woman.” In a send-up of divorce colonists who arrived with countless trunks of fashionable gowns and bought pianos for their hotel suites to pass the time, Mary describes two young women from Philadelphia who travel with “a box containing two pet alligators instead of the usual mandolin, guitar or banjo.” The alligators, of course, escape terrorizing divorce seekers in the city’s finest hotel. The townspeople were simultaneously appalled by the women who came in search of divorce and fascinated by them, eager to know every detail of their lives. The Divorce Mill had captured a town divided, desirous of the money the divorce seekers brought and wary of the infamy that accompanied it. Lewis practicing in Chicago at the time, and no reporter named Harry Hazel (Hazel was also the well-known pseudonym of the late Justin Jones, a writer with whom Mary would have been familiar.) As far as I can determine, there was no lawyer by the name of S.L. Newspapers panned the 25-cent book-“coarse and vulgar and wretchedly told,” the New Orleans Picayune wrote-but few questioned its authenticity or the identity of its authors. (And a source of disappointment and confusion for historians.) That “realistic” is not a synonym for “real” was widely overlooked by a reading public primed to believe any tittle-tattle from the divorce colony. Instead, what Mary was selling was what the country wanted: tales of “misery, sin and the follies of wives and husbands.” The Divorce Mill, published in 1895, billed itself as a book of “realistic sketches of the South Dakota divorce colony” written by Harry Hazel, a Chicago newspaper man, and S.L. In the throes of this turn-of-the-century culture war over marriage and divorce, it was not clear that Sioux Falls would be the tipping point in attitudes toward divorce in the country. Mary could report titillating gossip about these famous women, their broken marriages, and their new loves, but she could not tell you the story I can now. But she and the others-including Edith Wharton in Custom of the Country-who wrote books about the colony could not yet see its importance. She had chosen to seek a divorce in Sioux Falls after the stricter law had passed. Mary was herself evidence that this legislative effort to limit access to divorce was destined for failure. It was a costly undertaking-one that also came at the expense of a woman’s reputation-but so many others had made the same sacrifice that “going to Sioux Falls” had become a euphemism for “divorce” among Eastern elite. To fall under South Dakota’s jurisdiction, Mary would have to live in the state for six months to gain residency and continue to wait, 1,200 miles from home, as her case made its way through the courts. ![]() Over the four years of their marriage, she claimed, Michael had frittered away her $5,000 inheritance. In South Dakota, which had more lenient provisions, Mary could divorce for cruelty-he called her vicious names, she said-and non-support. She had many complaints against her husband Michael, but he had not been unfaithful. Under New York’s statute, Mary had only one cause to end her marriage: adultery. She made the trip-like many women before her-for a divorce.Īt the turn of the 20th century, the United States was a hodgepodge of state laws on divorce. In late 1893, Mary Cahill traveled from her home in Brooklyn, New York, to Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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