August 31, 2022
Entertaining Reading, “The Divorce Colony”
I highly recommend The Divorce Colony to divorcing men and women, anyone interested in history and anyone looking for an entertaining inspiring story. The review below was first published in the August 17, 2022 edition of The Wall Street Journal, as “Making Tracks for Splitsville“.
In late 19th-century America, Sioux Falls, S.D., was where the unhappily wedded relocated to obtain a quickie divorce.
The Cataract House Hotel in Sioux Falls, S.D., ca. 1890.PHOTO: THE SIOUXLAND HERITAGE MUSEUMS
By Barbara Spindel
In 1867, the Dakota Territory’s legislature reduced its requirement for legal residency to 90 days, an acknowledgment of the peripatetic nature of life on the American frontier. While the three-month rule granted eligible settlers the right to vote and other privileges, it also had an unintended consequence: Women began traveling west to take advantage of what was, at the time, the quickest path to a legal divorce.
April White tells the tale in “The Divorce Colony,” an entertaining and edifying account of the divorce industry that emerged in Sioux Falls, S.D. Sioux Falls became the go-to destination for those looking to escape a marriage—it was easily accessible by train and boasted an upscale hotel, the Cataract House, that was palatable to the East Coast elites who could afford to wait in luxury.
While some men traveled to Sioux Falls to dissolve their marriages, Ms. White reports that in the second half of the 19th century, nearly two out of three divorce-seekers were women. In addition to outnumbering the men, the women attracted much fiercer interest. As the author observes, “a man who expected his freedom was not as outlandish as a woman who demanded hers.”
Accordingly, along with dozens of law firms and various shops and restaurants catering to the city’s new high-end female clientele, the divorce industry supported a steady stream of newspaper correspondents. They hung around the Cataract hoping to break the news of the latest high-society wife to decamp to Sioux Falls from, say, New York, where the only path to divorce was proof of adultery, or Rhode Island, which required a full year of residency in order to petition to end a marriage.
Ms. White, a writer and editor at online travel magazine Atlas Obscura, benefits from the period’s fascination with the would-be divorcees, quoting liberally from lurid tabloid reports of their travails. She acknowledges that most of the Dakota divorces were quiet, mutual proceedings, but her book ends up being skewed toward the salacious cases. While they might not be representative, they surely make for more enjoyable reading.
The narrative is divided into four parts, each focused on a woman whose divorce featured prominently in the headlines at the turn of the 20th century. Maggie De Stuers, a descendant of John Jacob Astor, married a Dutch baron low on funds. She accused him of attempting to have her institutionalized so he could gain control of her fortune.
Mary Nevins eloped at 19 with Jamie Blaine, the dissolute 17-year-old son of the former senator and secretary of state, James G. Blaine. Her mother-in-law opposed the match, practically locking Jamie in the family home to keep the two apart. Mary arrived in Sioux Falls, charging her husband with abandonment. When the judge granted her divorce, he declared that Jamie’s family was to blame—“especially his mother.”
Free-spirited Blanche Molineux (née Chesebrough) penned an unpublished memoir revealing that she craved “passion and love” and “brute masculine force.” But her practical side won out, and she reluctantly married wealthy Roland Molineux. Tragedy ensued: Blanche’s lover turned up dead, and Roland was later tried for a separate murder by poison—at which he was sentenced to death. Ms. White suggests that Blanche was sorely disappointed when he was exonerated after a retrial. She boarded a train for Sioux Falls the day after he was freed.
Ms. White notes that many of Sioux Falls’s permanent residents clung to the “flattering fiction” that their well-heeled visitors were enchanted by South Dakota, despite ample evidence to the contrary: Most of the divorcees, while claiming that they were establishing residency in good faith, headed back east the moment they had their decrees in hand. The upstanding Flora Bigelow Dodge, unlike the others, adhered to the spirit of the residency rule, gamely immersing herself in Sioux Falls life even after her three months were up. She wrote cheerfully to her father about attending a weekly meeting of churchwomen who “sew and abuse their neighbors,” adding, “I skip it once in a while so they have a chance at me!”
Appearing throughout the book is Episcopal bishop William Hare, who called his state’s lax divorce laws “a national scandal.” His efforts to restrict divorce were opposed by both progressive thinkers and those loath to lose the income the practice brought to South Dakota. Still, for many Americans, divorce remained taboo. In 1908, when the question was put to a referendum, South Dakotans voted to extend the residency requirement to one year, effectively shutting down the “divorce colony.” Nevada later filled the gap, becoming known for quickie divorces. A 1969 law made California the first “no-fault” divorce state.
“The Divorce Colony” is subtitled “How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.” The divorce seekers, concerned primarily with their own situations, were certainly not revolutionaries like their contemporaries who were marching in the streets for suffrage. The women’s rights movement was itself divided on the question of divorce. Famed suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote that “the States which have liberal divorce laws are to women what Canada was to the slaves before Emancipation.” But others worried that easy divorce would be economically disastrous for women.
As for finding freedom, at a time when women couldn’t even vote, liberty came with caveats. Upon arriving in Sioux Falls, Blanche Molineux told a reporter, “I desire my freedom above all else in the world and I am justified in seeking it.” This was an audacious statement for a woman to make, but as when she’d married Roland, Blanche seems to have realized that her options remained limited. Flora reported that after her divorce, Blanche married “a dreadful little man.” Her liberation, hard-won, was apparently quickly surrendered.
Ms. Spindel’s book reviews appear in the Christian Science Monitor, the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere.
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