Wife’s education cited in divorce

July 25, 1912: Edward G. Kuster, a local attorney, filed for divorce from his wife, Una -- described by The Times as “one of the best-known members of the city’s circles of culture.”

Kuster’s account was “as strange a story as was ever told in the divorce court,” The Times reported.

Kuster and his wife met at UC Berkeley, and after their marriage she earned a master’s degree at USC.

There, he said, she encountered “the teachings of the so-called writers of mysticism or new thought,” which he said “had apparently killed the maternal spirit.”

Instead of appearing in court, Mrs. Kuster, who had left her husband in March, was in Europe, her husband said, “receiving her inspiration from the works of George Moore, Ibsen, Tolstoy and others.”