Henrietta Payne Westbrook (1834-1909) was a physician, reporter ,and author, who was also a close friend and early supporter of Ida Craddock, the heroine of my new novel Censored Angel: Anthony Comstock’s Nemesis. A believer in the right of a woman to choose her own husband, she was the free-love wife of the American secular advocate, Richard Brodhead Westbrook, a former minister, and later a lawyer and judge in Philadelphia. (Note: In a free-love marriage a couple choose to live as a married couple without benefit of a marriage license. For a definition see Free Love.)
In 1880, Henrietta Westbrook graduated from Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. Characterizing herself as a Lady Doctor” and “Reporter” she published a volume of travel vignettes, The Westbrook Drives, covering trips she took around the Philadelphia area and elsewhere on the east coast. Interspersed among the descriptions of local beauty and interesting sights, she also included her beliefs on marriage. The following is excerpted from Chapter 25 Is Marriage a Failure? P. 126-175.
In mere wedlock, I grant you, although it may become a heaven, there is usually a locally constructed hell.
I have seen pairs tied together at which I felt like exclaiming, “O horror ! horror! After this alliance, let tigers match with hinds, and wolves with sheep; and every creature couple with its foe.” How many such have, when too late, cried out in bitterness of soul?
“O for a curse upon the cunning priest, Who conjured us together in a yoke that galls us so! “
Many a man leads to the hymeneal altar the woman who is to be his torment and his ruin. Many a woman goes to the altar, like the lamb to the slaughter, with the man, who is to be, to all intents and purposes, her murderer!
I who speak to you, have stood by and seen and heard, the death blows dealt; and I was powerless to prevent. I know of many cases where the husband has been the direct cause of the wife’s death. Yet the law could take no hold on him. There are wounds which leave no external mark; yet a physician may discover them.
Words, and even looks, can stab as fatally as knives. I have seen those who “abroad were too kind, while at home ‘twas steadfast hate, and one eternal tempest of debate.”
Who among you has not known several families where the master was an object of terror? Where mirth was silenced, and all cheerfulness vanished, and callers suddenly remembered a previous engagement, when the gentleman of the house appeared?
Some men think variety the spice of life, and having by winning wiles secured a wife, seek then fresh fields and pastures new; but know young man, that “In the calm of truth -tied love there is a joy which novelty’s stormy raptures never yield.”
I have known someone who after a few years, or months, of married life, imagined they had compassed the sphere of the one by their side; and I have found them utter strangers to each other. Can two immortal souls, with infinite possibilities entirely fathom and exhaust each other?
It cannot be. There has been no union yet of two souls who think they have done this…True marriage is the nurse of all that is good. “In her arms sweet virtue smiles, appearing, as in truth she is. Heaven-born, and destined to the skies again.”
Love is eternal, and in true marriage, grows.
Henrietta Payne Westbrook’s Writings
The Westbrook Drives 1902
The Actor’s Child: A Study in Heredity or Anti-Natal Influences A Novel 1884
More about Henrietta Payne Westbrook
The Marriage Debate between Westbrook and Voltairine de Cleyre delivered in 1907 at the Radical Library of Philadelphia
“A man has no business to be less sweet than he expects his wife to be.”
Henrietta Westbrook p. 366 The Westbrook Drives