Marriage
On March 13, 1879, Russell married Maria Frances Ackley (/məˈraɪ.ə/; 1850–1938) after a few months' acquaintance. The couple separated in 1897. Russell blamed the marriage breakup on disagreements over Maria's insistence for a greater editorial role in Zion's Watch Tower magazine, though a later court judgment noted that he had labelled the marriage "a mistake" three years before the dispute over her editorial ambitions had arisen. Maria Russell filed a suit for legal separation in the Court of Common Pleas at Pittsburgh in June 1903 and three years later filed for divorce under the claim of mental cruelty. She was granted a divorce from bed and board, with alimony, in 1908. Maria Russell died at the age of 88 in St. Petersburg, Florida on March 12, 1938 from complications related to Hodgkin's disease.
Read more about this topic: Charles Taze Russell
Famous quotes containing the word marriage:
“Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)