(This story was originally written and recorded for Retrocast 38, released on December 3, 2025.)

When my wife Mary Jane and I married 17 years ago, we were both in our mid-40s.

And both of us were fairly well-established in our lives by that point. We both had stable careers, fully furnished apartments, and more stuff than we knew what to do with. We had duplicates of just about everything: blenders, clothes irons, TVs, dishes… I can go on and on.

Perhaps the hardest thing to deal with was the issue of money, not that the two of us had any disagreement. Neither of us began our careers with anything in the bank, so for many years after we were married, we kept our finances separate. It was more out of habit than anything else. But, over time, our finances naturally became more and more integrated.

Today, we still have separate bank accounts, but at some point years ago, I put my name on her account, and Mary Jane put her name on mine. And to pay her bills, money is constantly shuffled from one account to another, as needed.

In other words, everything we have belongs to both of us.

I mention all this because the question of a married couple’s finances was one that Magistrate Thomas MacFarland, of Philadelphia’s Central Police Court, addressed on the evening of February 27, 1912.

He was dealing with the case of John Dorcas, who lived at 1130 Waverly St. in that city.

Dorcas had been arrested on a charge of non-support, which had been brought on by a claim filed by his wife Veronica.

The two had not lived together for over a year.

“It ain’t no wonder, Judge,” said Dorcas. “That woman is one of man’s enemies. We men always hang together on the pocketbook question. Judge, she’s a robber. I caught her going through my pants’ pockets one night. She done me for four bits. Do you blame me for leaving her?”

To which Magistrate MacFarland snapped back:

“Blame you? Sure, I blame you. A man and a woman when married are one. What’s yours is hers, and what she has is yours, see. Therefore, she could not rob you of what belonged to her as much as it did to you. Every wife has a right to go through her husband’s pockets. $300 bail for the court.” ($300 is nearly $10,000 today.)

I’ll just finish the story by saying that my wife Mary Jane is welcome to go through my pockets every night. But she won’t find much, since she has all the same credit cards as me, and I rarely have much in the way of cash these days.