Citation Needed - The Divorce Colony

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier is a nonfiction book by April White. Published by Hachette Book Group in 2022, The Divorce Colony examines the role of Sioux Falls, South Dakota as a destination for divorce seekers through personal stories. Excerpts were published in The Boston Globe,[1] Smithsonian Magazine,[2] and on Politico.[3]

SONWING DUNCE YAY! Max out your getaway in Los Cabos with sunwing vacations. Take cannonballs in the pool to snorkeling at the arch, or drink at the resort bar toward night on the town. While you're at it, turn lounging on the beach into a day at the spa. When you save more, you can explore more, so give yourself what you need in Los Cabos.

Book with your travel agent or... So Dr. Octopus is a bad guy again. I mean, I guess so, but silk is gonna be awesome. I know I can't wait. Wait, wait. Spider-Man's doctor is an octopus? Ha! See, now this is risk-enhancing.

Dude, that's nothing. I can break out of this if I wanted to. Then do it, do it right now. I will. And boom. Get it, get it. Hey Eli, what is with the clones? Oh, no, Tom, see, see, so finally.

We're checking to see who would win in a fight again. Eli, you have to tell me. No, so you know how this week's episode is about the South Dakota divorce colony. Yeah. So I thought what better pre-Shotian Antigens than to spin up a couple of divorced versions of ourselves and see what they're like.

See, I'm totally out. You are not. You're still in total risk control right now. And as you can see, we are the worst. Yeah, I can see that, but where are you and I? Oh, you start to death and I, Rimmur, now that's right. I was gonna say.

So, what do we do with them? Same thing you do with all divorce guys. Hey, hey, you two, you two, what's up? Yeah, man, we're like talking about something important over here. Do you guys wanna go to a karate class? Oh shit! Is it that time already?

Hell yeah! Alright, I'll see you in the car. We're gonna go to karate class. See, see, this is why I always wear my gear. Always. Always gotta be ready for karate class. Yeah! Boom!

I don't think I would starve to death. Hey, name one way of preparing a food right now. Scrumping. Scrumping. Is that one? Is that a... Yeah, man, you got it. You got a nice. Hello and welcome, citation needed. Podcasts were chosen to subject free to single article about unw on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts because this is the internet. That's how it works now. I'm Cecil, I'll be presiding today,

but I'll need my four courtroom personalities, a bailiff, a stenographer, a defendant, and a plaintiff. All rise, sorry, late. Yes. That's my whole new job. Well, let me put jump on the stenographer Gren grenade to make sure Eli doesn't wind up with it. Yeah, defendant, it's just me and my 18 code defend. 17, oh 16 code, that's shit!

Which leaves me as the victim and I'd like to say narratively that tracks, I think I did not. Patrons, it's because of your good will that each week we can talk about obscure shit to entertain you. And if you're not a patron, you'd like to learn how to join their ranks. Be sure to stick around until the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us Eli what person-place thing, concept phenomenon or event we'll be talking about today.

We'll be talking about the divorce colony. And Noah, you read a book about this and you're ready to vehemently deny that it wasn't a Bill Bryson book. So yeah, it wasn't, no, it wasn't, that's fair, it wasn't. What was the divorce colony? Oh, if it were only that simple deer sizzle.

Yeah, I guess once in a blue moon, we can just answer a direct question in this part of the show. But other times, you have a topic that's far too nuanced for a quick answer, far too personal for a detached response and too devoid of substance for a reply with a relatively low word count. Because the story I want to tell you isn't actually about the divorce colony. It's about a member of said colony, but the name of Mary Nevans. This part of the show is turning into a prank a lot now. But see, but Mary Nevans is so obscure that she doesn't actually have a Wikipedia page.

And when you Google her name, you get these book profiles and links to ancestry.com. But to understand her story, you really need to know the state of divorce laws in America in her life. So I figured framing this episode around the divorce colony would let me throw a net around both of those things. Plus the divorce colony is a way more interesting episode title than just, you know, some lady's name that you've never heard of. Okay.

But if Old made Midtown and whatever, he is hamlet, don't make it into the essay. I am out of you. You know what I mean? Midtown and whatever he is hamlet don't make it into the essay. I am out of you. God, I love me a rambling intro Noah Noah you had me at word count. Thank you Tom. It was for you. Now I should say up front that if you'd like to learn more about Mary Nevin's after the episode, you're going to probably want to Google Mary Nevin's Blaine. But since the whole fucking story is about all the tumultuous shit she had to go through to remove the Blaine part,

I feel like an asshole adding it. So I'm just gonna call our Mary Nevin's throughout. And incidentally, at the risk of once again, betraying my literacy, I'd highly recommend the book where I learned about this as a source. It's called The Divorce Colony. It's my historian, April White, who is among a lot of other things, not Bill Bryson.

Okay, you get it. No, sometimes you read another author and Tom sometimes sits on a different dock staring into an entirely different body of water. Exactly. I had a human emotion the other day. Guys, can we cut it out with the meta stuff? It's alienating to the audience. I like to try to. I'm sorry. Eli, you want to get to the meta for you.

Seven new audience members of show everybody. Yeah. So anyway, it was my story. So our story starts at the end of the 1800s. A time when things were even worse for American women than under the Robert score. Give it time Noah. I really don't want to. So we're talking a full quarter century before women in this country earned the right to vote. So needless to say divorce was very much frowned upon even in the most dire of circumstances.

By the 1890s society had accepted that divorce was a necessary evil. That would have been how they looked at it in situations of abuse, adultery, or abandonment. But even then, the country had a bit of a, what did she do to deserve it, attitude that it would maintain for 133 years and counting actually, still to that. I feel like limiting divorce only to situations where there's abuse, adultery, or abandonment

really does a lot to encourage abuse adultery and abandon. Yep, sure does. Sure does. Now of course divorce was relatively easy to obtain even back then provided that you were a man, right? You couldn't quite just say, to lock three times, but it was it was close to that. The bar was those super high for women, especially women who just wanted to divorce their husbands because their husband sucked. So to get a divorce, women of the day were willing to suffer any number of indignities up to and including living in South Dakota. Yikes. Yeah, push and put a trigger warning on that.

Sorry. So divorce law varied state by state. And then as now, South Dakota didn't have a hell of a lot going for it, but what it did have were the most lax divorce laws in the country. South Dakota turns out misery doesn't love company. South Dakota, get away to get away. Oh, that's good. Oh, sure.

Now, to be clear, don't go there. We needed a third one. Don't go to South Dakota. Thank you. Thank you. You're all three. Now, to be clear, compared to today's standards, the 1891 divorce laws in South Dakota were ridiculously strict, but today's standards weren't what people like Mary Nevin's were comparing them to. They were comparing them to shit like the ridiculous laws in the then notoriously prudish New York state, where sure you could get a divorce for adultery,

but only if you could prove that your husband was cheating on you. And by contrast, all you had to do in South Dakota is satisfy a judge that you were unhappy in the marriage and weren't likely to be otherwise in the future. I feel like proving you were happy a single time in South Dakota is a pretty steep hill to climb. No, husband just sneaks over from the defense table starts tickling her. She's laughing. She's loving the cuts. I'd like to be happy in the future whenever I want. I can just

do. Of course, South Dakota wasn't the only state that allowed for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences. What set it apart more than anything was the residency requirements. So to get a divorce in a state you had to live in that state at the time. And at least for purposes of marriage contracts, most states made you live there for at least six months, sometimes as much as a year in order to establish residency. But in a desperate bid to gain citizens any fucking way it could, the newly minted state of South Dakota trimmed that down to 90 days.

So if you wanted a divorce in South Dakota, all you had to do is move there, live there for 90 days, file for your divorce, Continue to live there the entire fucking time it works its way through the courts and then assuming you were ultimately granted the divorce, you could move away with your freedom. You're on her as you can see I'd rather live in South Dakota this whole time Then be married to this piece of shit. So are we done here? I think we're done. Yeah. And you would be. Yeah.

So needless to say, changing residency for the purposes of divorce was a rich person's game, right? For the average woman, it was obviously impossible to just pack your shit, move to a state on the fringes of society, and just live there for several months, especially at a time when it was almost impossible for women, unmarried women to get jobs, especially since generally speaking, they'd be doing so without the support of their husbands. So the women who tended to do this were generally either independently wealthy or their husbands were wealthy and were okay with the divorce as long as the wife was willing to take all

the social stigma associated with it. And when women moved to South Dakota to obtain a divorce, it was generally seen by high society at the time as a pretty clear indication she was some kind of fluszy who wouldn't be granted the separation in a more civilized part of the country. Just because I got my divorce off the back of a chow wagon by a guy named Cookie, don't make it any less bad. Yeah. But ultimately, the combination of these lacks laws and the high incomes of the people who could afford to take advantage of them combined to bring us at long last to the name of the episode. See, there was only one hotel in all of South Dakota at the time that was nice

enough for millionaire eras is to say. That was a luxury hotel in Sioux Falls called the Cataract House. Cataract House, you won't believe your eyes. That's the waterfall thing. I really don't see what's so funny there Eli. It's a bit fuzzy actually. Jesus Christ. I should not have trusted you guys with that name. So it's popularity among the wealthy socialite seeking divorce led New York's tabloid press to basically just take up residency there.

And it also led to the same tabloid press dubbing at the divorce colony. And I have to mention this because while she plays virtually no role in this story at all, her name is too glorious to leave out the most well known of those gossip columnists covering the divorce colony was a chick named Fanny Tinker. Awesome. That is literally the whole reason I wanted to do this fucking story. Yeah, valid. That'll depend on your name, Astoy, but you know, it didn't roll off the tongue.

Sure. Just a little more artful. So it sounds like Chuck Tingle's writing partner or something. Tinker didn't Fanny by my own Fanny. I'm like, no, as hard as this might be to believe, the Americans of the 1890s were both more prudish and even more obsessed with celebrity marriages and divorces than the ones of the 2020s. I mean, sure, divorces and rumors of divorce were being covered by the Fanny tinkers of

the world, but they were also being closely tracked by the nation's clergy and their right wing punditry as well. Then as now jaded conservatives were pining to make America great again. And one of the chief flashpoints in the culture war at that time was the increasing frequency of divorce and the geographical center of that flashpoint just happened to be South Dakota. I'm pretty sure Noah just activated a winter soldier with that sentence about South Dakota mattering. So if you're like a politician or something, you can go play this.

Keep the, keep the, yeah, I had votes in for this one. Yeah. Now, I should note here, by the way, that the reason South Dakota was so notorious when it came to divorce was at least in part even dumber than you think. So in the late 1880s, the Bureau of Labor released a report on national divorce statistics and South Dakota topped the list in terms of the biggest increase

in divorce over the past five years. Compared to the middle of the decade, South Dakota had seen a 6,691% increase in divorce granted. That's a huge fucking number, but it's almost entirely due to population increase and better data gathering takes But at least you know more than one of them was due to what the doom cryers of the day dubbed a migratory Divorce and depending on who you asked that was either a symptom of or a cause of The ongoing decay of the American soul or it was both Okay, hear me out. We go to South Dakota, we have a bunch of frowning, disapproving men into a mountainside to lower divorce rates.

What do you say? No, shush more. That's what I'm talking about. Since it was the exclusive domain of the extremely wealthy, the women moving to South Dakota for the express purpose of divorce represented a really small part of that increase. But if you listen to the anti-divorced crusaders of the time you would never have guessed that. They painted this dire picture of women just cascading westward in an unending flood of promiscuity and lust, and they painted the cataract as a den of debauchery and sinful

pleasure, which is ridiculous because it was in South Dakota and nothing was ever pleasurable in South Dakota. Okay. How are men reading that and not going there? There's a flood of promiscuity in the lost made of rich women about to be single. Yes. Yes. Evite a fucking bat signal.

Go there. Yeah. 1800s. He's standing on the side of the South Dakota highway with a cardboard sign that says, I like your friends. Yeah. So this is the burbling cauldron of controversy that Mary Nevin's is walking into and she shows up at the cataract house in 1891. She was a 24-year-old former actress and current disgruntled wife of one Jamie Blaine, a man that was known to the tabloid press as a hard-drinking, flirtatious, ambitionless cat who is always in enormous debt. But the reason he was known to that tabloid press at all is that he was the son of one James G. Blaine, a powerful Republican politician

who had served as Secretary of State under three different presidents and was a fixture on the short list of potential Republican presidential candidates. Suffice to say, David and Goliath had nothing on the fight that Mary was in for. Well, this has certainly turned it into a salacious story. Someone involved has almost certainly had a laptop

with a dick pick on it. so while we search for that, we're going to take a little break for some apropos and nothing. Hi, I'm Jack Conting, and I'm Sam Yamp, a Founder of Patreon. We know the members of our community have had a few questions about the new changes to our platform lately, but we know when you get hooked in and hooked up, you'll be psyched about it just like we are. Whoa, a CEO saying psych? This guy must be cool. I it just like we are. Whoa, a CEO saying, Sike, this guy must be cool. I'm wearing a hat indoors. Here at Patreon, we have one job helping you trade hammocks in a social media, lateralized

beer space, with the ability to swap, pourps, and blurp your muggles, all without PCI inflection. More like inflection. If you're a creator on Patreon, all your patrons are now followers, and also patrons, but now people can follow you on Patreon without being a patron to what they follow. That one's real, but that's not all, or your account used to be divided by boring old pledge levels and member names, you can now search by scoch, runga dunks, and set up free transplorification right in your home unit. I'm in a band! So while we know it might take some getting used to, we know the family friendship marriage that Patreon really is is gonna rock on down to Chinatown when we finally friendship family these new awesome socks changes. Patreon!

Our business model is getting money for free and we can't stop fucking it up. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ We left off, presidential candidate's son and his private life were all over the tabloids. How is that different from now? Exactly. So let's back our story up to 1886, when aspiring actress Mary Nevin's met a dashed charming young man from a prestigious family in embarked on a whirlwind romance that lasted all at 18

days before the two of Malope. And this was all the more disgraceful mind you because Mary was an older woman. And James was a mere 17 years 51 weeks old at the time of their marriage, while Mary was a skandalously ancient 19 years old. That's right, barely even still a teenager. years old. That's right. Barely even still a teenager. So just to be clear, the opening love story here has less time under its belt than 90 day fiance. And it's going to end up in a divorce. No, say it ain't so. Now at first both families objected to the marriage, but fearful of drawing too much attention to what passed for controversy back then, James senior decided to embrace

the young couple at least publicly and it helped that the press kind of fell in love with them too because they were like really good looking and so they portrayed their relationship more in terms of star cross lovers than like a youthful indiscretion but every indication is that privately both James and his wife Harriet thought of Mary as a Jezebel that it seduced their naive son into marrying her in a selfish act of social advancement. I like that they take all kinds of advancement away from women at the time and the only one that they can actually do is social advancement through marriage and everyone's like, no, no, not like that.

You can't do it like that. Yeah, cool. Cool. I'll just get an MBA at Wharton. No problem. Yeah. I'll do that in 68 years when they admit women for the first time. Jesus Christ. But regardless of her true intentions, even by her own account, the part of their

relationship where she and Jamie were in love was pretty short-lived. He was a fucking piece of shit. He was a spoiled little rich kid whose daddy constantly got him new jobs And then he invariably piss away the job by showing up for it drunk when he showed up at all And then he would spend way beyond his means confident that his dad would foot the bill So anytime his dad decided to put his foot down Jamie and Mary were thrown into immediate poverty and according to the gossip columnist Jamie was also a fixture of the city's nightlife Although he was only rarely seen with marie well i'll know that c-cell you guys are old did you ever see them around like when

you guys were dating your wives and you're like double-dumple and me and c-cell were poor uh... at that center marie's life was fucking miserable she was an actor before she got married and by all accounts she was actually a pretty good actor. And acting, of course, at this time, was seen as a very low profession. And her very association with the theater was a big part of the reason that James and Harriet were so suspicious of her to begin with. But luckily for them, the laws of the time gave a woman's husband the right to cancel any contracts that she'd entered into before she married.

That's insane. Right? So all the contracts that she had as an actress simply disappeared as soon as her in-laws complained about them. Hello Columbia House DVD Club. Ha, ha, ha, ha, my husband wants to talk to you. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, I want my penny back. And I'd like my penny back. Yes. So after a few years of a boom and bust cycle of debt and bailouts, James and Harriet gave their son an ultimatum.

They said they would no longer pay his bills, but they would allow him and his wife to live at their house. So Mary was given the thrilling opportunity to live in a house with the father-in-law that thought she was beneath them and the mother-in-law that hated her with every fiber of her being. Suffice it to say Mary wanted out and she found a way out in the form of a train ticket to Sioux Falls. Still a tough choice though. It's like, do I live in a barren, solace wasteland surrounded by misery, strife, and indifference, a besetting all sides by stony disapproval? Or should I not go to self-destruct? Yeah, it's me.

Six and one, half does none of the other. Now, at first, the family was okay with this. Like I said, many families were perfectly happy to get rid of a pesky daughter-in-law through migratory divorce, as long as she was the one migrate. Right? In other words, as long as it looked like

at the end of the day that she was the one abandoning the marriage rather than her husband. Now bizarrely, it was illegal to collude on a divorce like that at the time. Divorces were by definition adversarial, so the system did not even have an allowance for an amicable separation. That was theoretically impossible. So officially, the planes never endorsed the separation, but they had no issue at all paying her bills at the cataract house for the time it took her to gain residency. Luck, I'll pay your bills, but you have to stand there. Well, I throw the money in your face and call you bitch, all right?

Okay. Think shaming. It's called taking a money shot. I was a bunch of people enjoying it. Thank you. How do you and Tom divide up Cogdis? I don't understand what he's saying. It's called taking a money shot. Thank you. How do you and Tom divide up Cogdis?

I don't understand. No, of course, the planes were getting something for their money, right? Like I said, Fanny, Tinker and her Elf were swarming all over the cataract house, dying for some juicy goss to share with the Manhattan socialites back home. And most of the women in the divorce colony were happy to share their tales of mistreatment and abuse at the hands of their husbands and their husbands families. But whenever anybody asked Mary, she had nothing negative at all to say about the planes. And the controversy of verse James Sr. was fine paying a little money to keep it that way.

I should be clear that despite Mary's tight lift policy with the press, they were still having a field day with this story. And the fact that Mary wouldn't badmouth a husband that was constantly in the tabloids for shit like drunken fist fights at yoldy waffle hut or whatever, just made her all the more sympathetic of a character. So pretty much all the press was pro Mary and anti-jame. It got so one-sided that at one point, James senior a hired private investigator to try to dig up dirt on Mary,

but either they sucked at their jobs or there was no dirt to find, because literally nothing ever came to light that cast any doubt on her integrity. That's gotta be tough on the PI though, you know, like, okay, let's see, anyway, and review my notes. Seems nice. That's my notes.

That's my notes. Probably getting fired. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. Now anyway, so after nearly a year of pork filings and red tape, Mary finally gets in front of a judge in February of 1892. And the courthouse is packed with over 250 on locus, mostly reporters who are about to finally get the story that Mary's been so reticent to talk about up until now. And it's very much the story of a wayward son and two parents bound and determined to break up the marriage any way that they could. And partly because she was so obviously aggrieved and partly because she was a very talented actress, she had the entire courtroom in tears by the end of her testimony. Hell, according to the press reports at the time, even the men were crying at the end of it. And that was illegal.

But the guys leaving the court, they have to face plan in a bowl of flour. And if any sticks on their cheek where there was a tear, they just shoot them right there. So yeah, it's like an Android tape live show. Yeah. Exactly. Now, from this point, normally there's a long waiting period where a case is considered and more forms are filed and more paperwork is returned and re-ratified and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But this, in this case, in particular, the judge was so moved by Mary's testimony that he reconvenes the court first thing in the morning in Grant's Marriott's divorce, full custody of their son, and Alimony, even beyond the amount that Mary was asking for. What's more, he also delivers a tirade from the bench about what a piece of shit her now ex-husband is and what a load some person her now ex-mother in law is. The judge reads into the court record among other things, quote, the cause of the astrangement and separation so far as the court is able to judge from the testimony was the unfriendliness on the part of the family of the defendant." End quote. Now keep in mind, the family he's talking about includes the secretary of state. And for our younger listeners, he used to be uncommon for

judges to have to condemn sitting members of the US government. So James senior hears about this, he goes through the roof, he's been trying to stay out of this, but now this judges attack his wife's integrity. So he immediately fires off this op-ed that because of his prominence. It's picked up by several of the largest newspapers in the country. And the gist of the op-ed is she's a filthy whore that seduced my impressionable naive son in hopes of getting at my money. Even quotes from love letters that she wrote to Jamie Jr. before their allotment where she says stuff like, you know, don't tell anybody about our plans and where she asks if he's figured out the state that'll grant them the

quickest marriage. Okay, obviously James senior is the bad guy here, but a marriage license should have a really long waiting. You know, let me just like it's better like you're buying a bazooka. Because the tea is. I got it. You go to the courthouse and you put a grain of sand into an oyster and America doesn't count. It's already big. Pearl.

I just feel like it's the safer process. You can look at married. Like options that vest. You know what I mean? It's just smart. And he promises he will call you on the phone when there is a string of those and not a moment sooner. Right.

Right. Now, I should point out here that there was still some legal ambiguity about South Dakota divorces at this point in history, right? So the fact that Mary had a decree in her back pocket wasn't necessarily the end of the story. There had been a recent Supreme Court ruling that called into question whether states had to recognize divorce degrees from other states if they convicted with the laws of the states where the marriage license was issued.

And while there was no question that Mary and Jamie's separation was final, a challenge by Jamie could call the alimony and possibly even custody of their kid into question. So Mary fought back and she did so on James's chosen turf. She wrote an op-ed of her own where she jujitsu the shit out of his narrative. It is a fucking work of art. So she basically she starts off by going like, wow, that was such a great op-ed you wrote. I can see why you are a world famous diplomat and I'm just some lowly woman trying to get by without the help of her husband. And then she asks him in the name of honor to quote, have the kindness

to publish in connection with your statement, the full texts of the letters you have quoted from adding quote, do not like a shrewd and unprincipled person select only such pages as may be needed to make your case end quote. And just in case the ultimatum part of that was it clear enough, she says quote, I will give you sufficient time in which to conform to my reasonable demand, say 10 days. If at the end of that time you clear enough, she says, quote, I will give you sufficient time and wish to conform to my reasonable demand, say 10 days. If at the end of that time you failed to respond, I shall deem it my duty to give in substance their content and corroborate my statement by publishing letters from your son. Fantastic.

And quotes. Yeah. Which I'll remind you are mostly pencil sketches of his dick. Exactly. which I'll remind you are mostly pencil sketches of his dick. Exactly. No, the 10 days came and went and neither James nor Mary published the letters. No official word on why, but I will point out that James spent the entire rest of his career, vociferously denying that he ever paid Mary a large sum of money for every correspondence ever written between his son and herself. And that said letters. That's really specific to exist. And absolutely nothing to do with the reason why he never

made good on his promise to appeal the divorce ruling in South Dakota and challenge the Alimony demands. One thing it definitely had to do with though was the fact that Blaine's political career pretty much ended the day Mary's op-ed came out and painted him as the bully that he was. The whole fucking narrative that the president been using up to this point and that the judge had used was that he was too controlling and too domineering. And the fact that he proved it by threatening her from across the country through newspapers certainly didn't dissuade people from that perception.

For her part, Mary as near as anybody can tell, went on to live happily ever after. Okay. I feel really confused though. When a citation needed essay and to the happy ending, who do we mock? Like who's graves are the dancing? Thank you. Tons of asses. The planes, the, you can still dance in the planes. Oh, they're all, they're all, they're all, they're all, they're putting stuff on our body. It's, and look, here's the thing. We celebrate a lot of the milestones along the road towards equal rights. We celebrate women's suffrage and the depressingly recent year of 1920 and the time that they won the right to open their very own bank accounts and the tear of pyingly

recent year of 1974. We celebrate that brief period when they had the right to abortion between 1973 and last year. But we very rarely celebrate the right to divorce. Even today, it's still painted with a negative social stigma that perpetuates a culture of female servitude. And I feel like people like Mary, like who fought long battles against impossible odds to further the rights of women forever deserve at the very least enough historical recognition to have their own fucking Wikipedia page. Hell yeah. And if you were to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? deserve at the very least enough historical recognition to have their own fucking Wikipedia page.

Hell yeah. And if you were to summarize what you learned in one sentence, what would it be? America fucking sucked back when it was granted then. That makes you ready for the quiz. That I am. Okay Noah. What's the moral of the story? Hey, divorce is fucking amazing.

Such a good name. B, if you're happily married, congrats. Nobody cares. This is not about you. C, if you're not happily married, your spouse is probably bad. Or your bad. Or regardless, a divorce is great for all of those things. Salsamov.

D, every woman I've ever talked to about their divorce is so fucking happy about it. Like psych, doing celebrations. E. Same for most of the men I've talked to. A couple of the men were mad, but for them, C. previous answer. Or F. All the above. It is B. Listen to its B. The answer is B.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. The answer is B. I'm sorry. It's not about you exactly. Congrats to everyone who got a divorce recently. Such a good move. So good. Congrats. New sex. Best ever. All right. He seems calm and chill. So no. I think he don't protest the exact right amount as well. Yeah, I often scream. I often scream things alone in my sound studio. I have calm and chill beliefs about your normal quiet in your sound studio and say normal things that are reasonable. You do, you do a lot of like nuanced takes that aren't joking.

I don't like men of humor. I'm gonna e-read her. All right, Noah, what should they call the movie about the heroic life of Mary Nevens? Hey, there's something about Mary. Okay. B, like check or C, enough. All right, I'm gonna go with A, there's something, but we'll do it, there's something about Mary 2. Or the prequel, it'll be a prequel, so minus one or whatever. All right, Noah.

A divorce only seems sad if, A, you're not the one asking for it. B, that's it, otherwise it's great. Yeah. C, really, 10 out of 10. Or D, even if you have to go all the way south to Coda. Yeah, the answer is obviously, that is the big lesson is that it was so important that people were willing to move to fucking south to Coda for it. So the answer is D.

I'd a road trip. You're right. Absolutely. Tom would have gone to Gary in the Indiana, wherever you need to go. I mean, I'd, I'd have bit my tongue, but yeah, I'd have gone. All right, no, you won't. I'm not a parent anymore. All right, I would like, I'm gonna regret saying this, but I would like an Eli essay. You will have a schedule for these days. I have to say that I guarantee you will. All right, well, for all the guys, I'm Cecil, thank you for hanging out with us

today. We'll back next week. By then, Eli will be an expert on something else. Between now and then donate to Volgaryte for charity, which is going on right now. Volgaryte for charity is a wonderful little charity drive. We do every single year where you send money to monosneeds and then you send proof of that to us at Volgaryte for charity at gmail.com.

And then you choose people who you want us to roast and we will roast them for you. And it's an amazing thing that happens on our other shows. If you don't listen to those other shows, take a look at the website, you can find out what ones they are. Alright, like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the store notes, be sure to check out citationpod.com. And then you gotta get a proper joint lock like this. It's going nowhere, man.

That's literally fucking nowhere. Yeah. Hey, how come you didn't make a divorced clone of Heath? Oh, the computer couldn't do it. Just ripped him in half down the middle. Oh, yeah, it makes sense. Hey, I have a butterfly knife. I also have a butterfly.

I have none shocks too. Nobody goes on vacation for the moments that are just... Okay. That's why sunwing vacationers go all in like it's a buffet of fun. Whether you're skimming the tree tops like Tarzan's long-lost twin, or deep-end swimming with your flippers and fins. Or maybe you're just perfecting the art of doing absolutely nothing. Whatever vacation you are, with sunwing, you save more, so you can do more.

Book with your local travel agent, or...