SELFISH INTENTIONS - K-REx - Kansas State University

after five years away from Kansas, she had simply lost interest in the marriage, since no one who
knew him believed that Charles Lease was the “deadbeat” husband that her petition claimed he
was. He was just a man who made less money than his wife. The Kansas constitutional
provisions that granted married women the right to their own property were probably on her
mind: a divorce would allow Mary Lease to keep what was hers for her use alone. In any case,
Charles Lease did not file a counter petition (although he could have accused her of
“abandonment”). In fact the Wichita Daily Eagle reported her husband’s response:
“Mrs. Lease is all right,” said Mr. Lease to a reporter for the Eagle yesterday,
with sorrow depicted in every line of his face. “She is wonderfully ambitious, and
I presume she thinks she can make her own way in the world better without me. I
never made any resistance to her getting a divorce, when I once made up my mind
that she desired to have one. …I have not one word to say against Mrs. Lease.
She had to say something to get her divorce and my mind was made up to allow
her to say whatever she thought best.” 2
It appears that Charles and Mary Elizabeth Lease had mutually decided (although reluctantly on
his part) to end the legal “contract” that had established their marriage. Why then did she accuse
him of being a “ne’er do well husband” who “squandered” her earnings? 3 The answer is that the
state of Kansas did not view the Lease marriage as a contract, but rather as a social unit in which
the state had an interest. In seeking to end her marriage, Mary Elizabeth Lease’s petition had to
fit one of the ten grounds that Kansas law allowed for divorces and all those “grounds” were
based on the claim that one party had violated the very nature of the role he or she had assumed
upon becoming a “husband” or a “wife.”
2 Wichita Daily Eagle, “Mr. Lease is Forgiving,” May 25, 1902, Mary Elizabeth Lease folder, Kansas State
Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas.
3 Price, 32.
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