A Bill of Divorcement

During the years immediately following the end of the First World War, there was widespread public concern in Britain that the War had unleashed or accelerated certain irreversible processes of political, social, and cultural decline, and that the psychological effects of the conflict were undermining the mental and moral health of British society. ¹ A series of apparently casual or motiveless killings involving shell-shocked ex-soldiers who had been unable to readjust to peacetime conditions were given widespread sensational coverage in the press, and for a time there existed a climate of fear verging on moral panic that the violence of the Western Front, so long kept at bay, was at last coming home to Britain. ² At the same time, there was an equally widespread, though less vocal, apprehension that the stability of marriage and the traditional male-dominated family unit were in danger, not just from the traumatic experiences of the First World War but from far-reaching changes in the rights and roles of women that wartime conditions had either set in motion or accelerated. ³