Wit & Attitude Quote by Lemuel K. Washburn

Washburn’s line is built like an indictment disguised as common sense. He doesn’t argue that “obey” is outdated; he argues it’s lethal. The shock comes from his bookkeeping: graves versus courts. Divorce court, in this framing, isn’t a moral scandal but a safety valve, and the real scandal is how rarely women reach it. That blunt comparison exposes a system that prefers quiet suffering to public paperwork.

The intent is surgical: to puncture the genteel fiction that “a wife must obey” is merely a domestic guideline or a religious nicety. Washburn treats it as an ideology with a body count. “Foolish and cruel” is a two-part diagnosis - stupidity and malice working together. The subtext is that obedience is enforced not by persuasion but by social pressure and, often, violence. If a woman’s “duty” is submission, then harm becomes private, deniable, and endlessly postponed: don’t leave, don’t speak, don’t embarrass the family, don’t break the covenant. The grave is what happens when those delays are applauded as virtue.

Context matters, too. Washburn is writing out of a legal and cultural world where coverture and its long afterlife made marriage less a partnership than a hierarchy with state backing. Even when divorce existed, stigma, economic dependence, and custody laws turned it into an option in theory, not practice. The line works because it flips the era’s moral math: the so-called sanctity of marriage is measured not by endurance, but by survival.