The Goslin v. Magher case was particularly unique, but not because Goslin was suing a third party for the breakdown of her marriage. Rather, that Goslin used a relatively new rhetorical device to build her case: She claimed that Magher was a love pirate. The term might conjure a mental image of balbo beards, flamboyant waistcoats, and finely sharpened cutlasses. But once again, just as the term heart balm had nothing to do with ointment, love pirate also had nothing to do with buccaneering.

Instead, the term was invented by the spurned Chicago housewife Rose Allegretti in 1908. It referred to “the demure, tailor-made little typewriter girl whose habitat is the skyscraper, whose weapon is the two-edged sword of coquetry, whose prize is the human heart.” Much like Una Goslin, Rose Allegretti blamed the dissolution of her marriage on a young stenographer who worked for her husband, Benedetto Allegretti, the Chocolate King of Chicago.

After her divorce, Rose denounced all stenographers as love pirates in the November 1, 1908 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She sounded a warning to all wives with husbands who employed women in their offices:

Know them. Know them intimately. For the girl in the downtown office is a menace to the home. Whether she be innocent in it or not, she is in a position to become more intimate with your husband than yourself. She is associated with your husband more of the waking hours than you. Every day she can appear to better advantage than you. For she is beset by none of the cares of the housewife and the mother.

In her 1909 book, Why American Marriages Fail, Anna Rogers explained that “a good wife is the immovable shore to her husband’s restless life.” So amongst the cares that troubled someone like Rose Allegretti, there was also the expectation of her constancy and stability. She calls to mind the trope of the waiting woman, perched on the widow’s walk with her eyes scanning the horizon for her wandering, seafaring husband. Would he return to her or would he be led astray? In 1908, The Chicago Inter Ocean warned that heedless husbands might be towed as a prize to “Curtain Lecture Harbor” and “Divorce Court Bay,” or perhaps worst of all, be lured away by the “pretty little heart buccaneers that cruise the business sea of downtown Chicago.”

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Infidelity is almost always a public offense instead of a private one. That’s because infidelity doesn’t just threaten a single relationship. Instead, it threatens a public idea, what the psychotherapist Esther Perel calls “the grand ambition of love.” In the early 20th century, this idea of love referred to a marriage composed of a husband who worked outside of the home to provide financial security, and a wife who was confined to the role of homemaker and mother. In this sense, the woman who chose to step outside of the home and pursue her own financial security was considered to be a double threat to male and female gender roles.