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Title: Dorothy Dix—her book
Every-day help for every-day people
Author: Dorothy Dix
Release date: February 23, 2025 [eBook #75448]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1926
Credits: Bob Taylor, Tim Miller and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Books project.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DOROTHY DIX—HER BOOK ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
[Illustration: _Yours Sincerely_
_Dorothy Dix_]
_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_
Every-day Help
For Every-day People
[Illustration: Decoration]
SECOND EDITION
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK and LONDON
1927
COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[Printed in the United States of America]
Published, August, 1926
Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention
of the Pan-American Republics and the
United States, August 11, 1910.
_Contents_
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD xi
INTRODUCTION xix
I HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED 1
II CHARM 10
III THE ORDINARY WOMAN 22
IV TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER 27
V STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY 32
VI JEALOUSY 39
VII HAVE A GOAL 44
VIII THE GOAT FAMILY 48
IX SPOILING A WIFE 53
X THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS 58
XI THE DEADLY RIVAL 63
XII LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS 67
XIII TRIAL DIVORCE 76
XIV MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE 81
XV ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF? 87
XVI KEEPING YOUNG 92
XVII GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN 96
XVIII THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN 100
XIX AN INDOOR SPORT 105
XX SHOULD WOMEN TELL? 109
XXI DOMESTIC BOREDOM 114
XXII TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY 118
XXIII WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT 122
XXIV GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS 127
XXV ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER? 132
XXVI THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN 136
XXVII THE MOTHER-IN-LAW 140
XXVIII WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US 145
XXIX OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM 149
XXX HUSBAND LOSERS 154
XXXI MARTHA OR MARY? 159
XXXII THE T. B. M. AT HOME 163
XXXIII DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM 169
XXXIV QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE 174
XXXV HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM 180
XXXVI THE POWER OF SUGGESTION 185
XXXVII WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY 190
XXXVIII HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND 195
XXXIX GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES 200
XL SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN 205
XLI TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS” 210
XLII BEING A GOOD WIFE 215
XLIII INVALIDISM A GRAFT 222
XLIV SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER 227
XLV SELF-CONTROL 231
XLVI OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS 236
XLVII LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE 240
XLVIII THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN 245
XLIX FORGET IT 249
L LOST LOVE 254
LI THE SHOW WEDDING 259
LII WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE 264
LIII WHAT PRICE PLEASURE? 269
LIV THE IDEAL MOTHER 273
LV HOW TO CATCH A WIFE 278
LVI DANGEROUS GIRLS 283
LVII WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN 288
LVIII MARRIAGE LESSONS 293
LIX THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN 297
LX NEW IDEALS FOR OLD 301
LXI WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON 305
LXII THE CHILDREN PAY 310
LXIII THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING 315
LXIV A FATHER’S INFLUENCE 320
LXV THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN 325
LXVI A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME 330
LXVII DEVOURING FRIENDS 334
LXVIII THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 338
LXIX PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE 343
_Foreword_
_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_
A FOREWORD BY RICHARD DUFFY
To the accurately estimated millions of readers who are familiar with
Dorothy Dix’s understanding and interpretation of the plain facts
of everyday life and also its enigmas, it may appear a presumption
that one should attempt a foreword of explanation to make clear why a
choice of her daily contributions to the press, not only in the United
States and Canada, but also in farther regions of the world, should
be deemed worthy of the more permanent shelter of book covers. But it
becomes at once justifiable when we try to present a true account of
the work of “The Little Lady of New Orleans,” as one of her oldest
editors calls her. She herself confesses that, among the hundreds of
letters she receives each day from men and women, young, adult and
aged, there recur the questions: “Are you a real person, or only a
newspaper syndicate name?” “Are you a man, or are you a woman?” “Are
you married or single?” “Have you ever been married?” “If you have not
been married, would you marry?” “If you have been married—and are not
now—would you marry again?” “Have you any children? If so—are they
boys or girls—and how many?” It must be emphasized that the questions
above recorded are not asked by correspondents merely curious, who put
the questions just to probe the author of the Dorothy Dix articles.
Not at all, these questions are asked in letters revealing the puzzles
of life that entangle the very writers who address Dorothy Dix. Before
they make the simplest inquiry as to the trustworthiness of Dorothy
Dix, they tell their own troubles in the way we all have of saying:
“Of course what I have said to you is wholly confidential. Now let me
know where you stand—I mean about absolute personal fidelity.” To a
hard-boiled business man, or business woman, such a remark seems trite.
Yet, we must remember that hard-boiled business persons run to the
courts every so often to discover between themselves, at great expense,
how personal fidelity, in gush and in fact, sharply contrast.
The self-styled hard-boiled people and the people who pretend they
are less sophisticated than they are, look to Dorothy Dix for a way
out of all their troubles. These two classes are to be reckoned with,
because they are always telling their troubles to some confidant—the
less known, the better. But the vast majority of the people who write
to Dorothy Dix for counsel and guidance are profoundly sincere and
earnest, not so much because they fear to be otherwise, but because
they are so firmly persuaded of the sincerity and earnestness of life
itself, when they look it square in the face and without pose of any
kind. All and any of these correspondents of Dorothy Dix are struggling
with their problems of how to make life livable. In the case of the
young woman who has a good job and, at the same time, has a good home
with her parents, the question arises whether she should marry the man
she likes, and who on his part likes her, and then undertake to become
a parent herself without a salaried job and without the safeguard
of the home provided by her father and mother. On the other side
there appears the problem of the young man, who would marry, but for
responsibilities, psychological as well as financial, that make him
stop, look and listen before he leaves a dependent father and mother
unsupported.
We pass to the men and women who are actually married and suddenly
discover that they are facing the real and inevitable conflict of life
at home as compared with the daily battle of the business world. Some
husbands are go-getters, but they do not get anywhere because their
wives are shiftless as home managers, or because they are spendthrifts,
and would always, without trying, spend twice as much money as any
husband has, or can earn. Some wives are the best of helpmates, but are
linked to husbands who simply cannot or will not achieve the quiet
fame of a weekly pay-envelope which is the rock foundation of “Home
Sweet Home.”
Some wives are afflicted with the disease of “social climbing.” They
spend their days and nights proving to their husbands that for every
dollar earned, it is better to spend two dollars, in order to take a
chance at three, by inviting the Smiths to the theatre and to supper
afterward. Such wives usually overlook the fact that the Smiths, with
whom they would curry favor at great expense, are themselves spending
two dollars for every one dollar gained on the principle that it is a
good investment to obtain equal social standing with the Joneses.
Also to be encountered in this book are the varied specimens of
husbands and wives who have become tired of each other and seek from
Dorothy Dix guidance towards a way out of what they consider the
morass of marriage. Then, too, we meet the father, or the mother, who
is perplexed about the way children grow up nowadays—as tho the way
children grew up has not always been a surprise to parents since the
days of Romulus and Remus. To sum up, all _dramatis personæ_ in the
stupendous play of life, being enacted day in and day out, as we live,
are brought on the world’s stage before us, not so much by Dorothy
Dix as by themselves in the confidences they repose in her and the
disclosures they make about themselves.
Despite this fact there never has been nor will there be anything
merely approaching a betrayal of confidence by Dorothy Dix. She talks
to the whole world of men and women, and their worries and concerns are
so alike that all shadow of individual identity is lost. She talks to
them, not from the pedestal of the highbrow, but from the average level
of a human being, who herself has fought the grim battle of life—as may
be learned from her personal statement, which immediately follows these
pages. One of the most distinguished of living American novelists, on
being shown a few letters in her day’s mail, asked:
“How many such letters do you receive a month?”
She replied: “It takes me from three to four hours each day to answer
my correspondents—and then I have to write my articles besides.”
“Great Scott!” exclaimed the novelist. “You have more plots in a day’s
letters than any hard-working novelist could invent in a year.”
But none of these potential plots is available even for the most
prolific of story-writers, because they are not “plots” to Dorothy Dix,
but sacred testimonies to the help the “Little Lady of New Orleans” has
been able to render through many years to her ever-increasing number of
friends and confidants.
_Introduction_
_Introduction_
MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
I have had what people call a hard life. I have been through the depths
of poverty and sickness. I have known want and struggle and anxiety and
despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength.
As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the
wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions—a battle
in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and
which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time.
Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone
sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all that I have
gone through.
For I have lived. They have only existed. I have drunk the cup of life
down to the very dregs. They have only sipped at the bubbles on the top
of it.
I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are
blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with
tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all
the world.
This of itself is a compensation for many sorrows, but I have more. I
have proved myself to myself. I know that I have the strength to endure
and the courage to carry on, and that I will not be craven enough to
run up the white flag, no matter what other difficulties I may be
called upon to meet.
The skeleton at the feast of the woman who has always been happy and
prosperous is fear. She becomes panic-stricken when she thinks that
she may be called upon to meet trouble; that she may have hardships
to endure; that her soul may be torn with suffering. She suffers
with apprehension at the thought of poverty, and wonders how she
could endure to go shabby and do without the things to which she is
accustomed. She wonders helplessly what she would do if she had to earn
her own living.
_I am not afraid of poverty_ because I have been poor and I know that
poverty has its consolations and brings you pleasures that money cannot
buy. Nor am I afraid to support myself. I have earned my bread and
butter for many years. I know the joy of work and I know that to a
woman, just the satisfaction of knowing that she is self-supporting
turns her crust into angel’s food.
None of the fears with which happy women torture themselves upon
occasion have any terrors for me. I know them for the bogies they are,
and know, too, that they fly away before the person who does not cringe
before them.
Often I am tempted to envy the woman who has always had some strong
man to stand between her and the world, some man whose tenderness and
love has guarded and protected her. But I am consoled for not being a
clinging vine when I wonder what the vine would do and think how broken
it would be if the sturdy oak on which it hangs were laid low.
I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that
no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live
each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading to-morrow.
It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. I put
that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time
comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given
me.
Little annoyances have no longer the power to affect me. After you have
seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about
you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the
doilies under the finger bowls or the cook spills the soup.
I have learned not to expect too much of people and so I can still
get happiness out of the friend who isn’t quite true to me, or the
acquaintance who gossips about me, and I can even find pleasure in the
society of those whose motives I see through.
Above all I have acquired a sense of humor, because there were so many
things over which I had either to laugh or cry. And when a woman can
joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever
hurt her much again.
So I do not regret the hardships I have known because through them I
have touched life at every point. I have lived. And it was worth the
price I had to pay.
DOROTHY DIX.
_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_
_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_
I
HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED
Altho marriage has been the chief business of woman since Eve
pulled off the first wedding in the Garden of Eden, women have not
yet mastered the first indispensable principle of success in their
profession. Millions of women have been married. Hundreds of thousands
of women marry annually, and yet, as a class, women do not know how to
treat a husband.
Here and there is a shining exception to this rule, and the result is
an inspiring picture of domestic bliss. But the great majority of women
still go stumbling along into misery and divorce because they have not
had the wit to find out how to rub man’s fur the right way, and make
him purr under their hands.
In a word, women fail to strike just the right note in their attitude
towards their husbands. Sometimes they treat them better than they
deserve. Sometimes worse, but seldom do they treat the men just as the
men would like to be treated.
Perhaps the real reason that women fail in this most important
particular is because they make the mistake of treating a husband as
if he were a rational human being, and the same sort of an individual
inside of the home circle that he is outside of it.
Never was there a greater error. The John Smith to whom a woman is
married is no more the John Smith of the business world than he is some
other man.
The John Smith, who is a lawyer, or a doctor, or a grocer in the
outer world, is a big, strong, broad, self-reliant man who looks at
everything in a large way, and is just, and tolerant, and even stoical
in meeting the vicissitudes of life. The woman who marries him has
perceived all of these qualities, and loved him for them, and she
naturally expects him to exhibit these characteristics in home life.
Fatal blunder. John Smith, the business man, may be dealt with on a
plain, sensible, aboveboard platform, but John Smith the husband, has
to be jollied, and cajoled, and petted, and wheedled along the road he
should go, if there is anything doing in the domestic felicity line in
the household of which he is the alleged head.
Now the majority of husbands average up quite as well as the majority
of wives, but even when a man is really good, and true, and strong,
experience teaches his wife that there are three ways in which he likes
her to treat him. They are:
(a) Like a baby.
(b) Like a demigod.
(c) Like a good fellow.
No matter how big and strong a man is, nor how many other men he
bosses, he wants his wife to treat him as if he were a delicate infant
who had to be petted, and nursed, and dandled, and chucked under the
chin. There isn’t a man living whose secret ideal of a perfect wife
isn’t a woman who puts the buttons in his shirt, and lays out his
collar and tie in the morning, who has his slippers toasting on the
radiator when he comes home of an evening, and who cooks just the
particular thing he likes to eat, with her own hands.
Talk about your women who can hand out intellectual companionship!
Produce your living pictures! Exhibit your paragons of virtue! They are
simply not one, two, three with the wise dame who pets and fusses over
her lord and master. And it isn’t because the man really wants his wife
to wait on him. That doesn’t enter into it at all. He’s just like the
three-year-old who howls for mama to put on his shoes or butter his
bread when there are seven nurses standing around to do it.
Men are babyish in wanting their wives to show them off. The
expression on the face of little Tommy while his fond mother is telling
the smart things that he said, is exactly the same expression that
is on Tommy’s father’s face while his wife is bragging about how he
organized a trust, or won a big lawsuit, or was elected judge.
Wise,—oh, a daughter of Solomon is the woman who puts her husband
through his paces for the benefit of company. Matrimony is one long,
glad sweet song in the household of the lady who acts as a showman for
hubby.
Consider also a man when he is sick, or thinks he is sick. How does he
want to be treated then? Like a baby. He wants his wife to sit by his
bed, and hold his hand, and weep tears of sympathy, and if she doesn’t
believe he is going to die every time he has a headache, he considers
her a cold, heartless icicle and doubts her affection.
Therefore, the very first principle in treating a husband is to treat
him as if he was your littlest baby, and if you do, he will gurgle, and
coo just as your two-year-old does when you smother him with kisses,
and asks: “‘Oose de most booflest boy on earf, an’ mudders itty, pitty
wonder, and world beater?”
Secondly, every husband likes to be treated as if he were a demigod.
Men won’t admit it, but in his soul every husband feels that he has
conferred such an inestimable boon upon his wife by marrying her that
she can never really repay him, anyway, but that it is up to her
to keep busy on the job. Therefore, the least she can do is to act
grateful.
The real reason why there is a continual conflict in most families over
the money question is not because husbands are stingy, but because a
man likes to dole the money out, piece by piece, so that the woman who
gets it may have a living exhibition of his generosity.
When a man complains about how extravagant his wife is, and how much
her hat and dress cost, it doesn’t mean that he begrudges her a single
garment or the price thereof. On the contrary, it is his way of
boasting to the world of how prosperous he is, and how well he provides
for his family. Stupid, indeed, is the woman who does not comprehend
this, and who does not keep her glad rags hanging in public, so to
speak, and continually beat upon the cymbal, and chant pæans of praise
about how good her husband is to provide her with her lovely clothes.
Nor is this as silly as it sounds. The average man gets practically
nothing out of his labor, after he has supported his family, but his
board and clothes, and it is pretty discouraging to spend your life
toiling for those who take all that you can give, and make no sign of
appreciation in return. So it is not strange that husbands like their
wives to treat them as a beneficent providence from whom all blessings
flow.
Husbands like to be treated as good fellows.
If the average married man could put up one prayer more fervent than
all the rest it would be this: “Lord, send me a wife who laughs, and a
home that isn’t an understudy to a funeral parlor!”
But his prayer isn’t often answered.
Now one of the great reasons why so many husbands and wives make
shipwreck of their lives together is because a man is always seeking
for happiness, while a woman is on a perpetual still hunt for trouble.
When anything uncomfortable happens to a man he tries to forget it,
to put it behind him, to get it out of his thoughts, even if he has
to drown it in drink. When a misfortune befalls a woman she gloats
over it. She keeps pressing her finger on every sore until she makes a
raging abscess of it. Then she goes on a jag of tears.
The result of this feminine peculiarity is that the average home is not
a cheerful place, nor is the average wife a joyous companion, and that
is why a very large number of husbands seek their amusements elsewhere,
and with other people. The greatest danger that menaces domesticity is
that so many wives are killjoys.
The question is often asked—why do men, who are penurious and niggardly
to their families, and who never pay a household bill without
grumbling, spend money so lavishly on their vices? The answer is easy.
A man’s home is dull, and the money that his family costs him gives
him no fillip of pleasure. The other does. The home has been made to
mean to him nothing but hard duty, ungilded by any joy. The opening
of champagne for chorus girls is to the tune of gaiety and laughter.
Therefore, he is willing to pay for one and begrudges paying for the
other.
Once I was listening to a group of intelligent people discuss the most
desirable quality in a wife. They named the usual standard virtues
until suddenly one man burst out in a voice surcharged with genuine
emotion.
“I tell you,” he said, “what a man wants in a wife more than anything
else is a cheerful companion. Goodness? Bah! All women, at least the
kind a man marries, are good. Economy? A man likes to spend money
on his wife. Amiability? Who wants a simpering doll always about?
Domesticity? Stuff and nonsense. A man’s stomach isn’t the most
important part of him. Besides there is a good restaurant on every
corner, if he is bound to gorge himself on food.
“I tell you what a man wants is cheerfulness in his wife. He wants to
come home at night to somebody who will meet him with a smile, somebody
who has got a lot of bright little things to tell him, and who can make
him laugh, somebody who is willing to put on her prettiest dress and
go out with him if he wants to go to any place of amusement.
“He doesn’t want to come home to a woman who is sodden with tears,
or who is running over with the accumulated worries of the day that
she dumps on him, who is full of her own and other people’s hard luck
stories, and who looks like a chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.”
Of course, whether a wife is melancholy or not does not, from an
ethical standpoint, alter her husband’s duty to her. He should be
strong enough to love and cherish her no matter how lacrimose she
is; but the martyr’s crown is a piece of headgear that is distinctly
unfashionable at the present time, and most men duck wearing it.
Wherefore, it behooves the Amalgamated Order of Doleful Wives to
cheer up, and try to be more lively companions to their husbands if
they don’t want those gentlemen to stray off in search of ladies with
sunnier dispositions.
As a matter of fact, men are, emotionally, very primitive creatures
with a few simple domestic wants. They desire to be petted, and
jollied, and looked up to by their wives, and then they want to be
treated as good fellows. They want their wives to be chums with them,
and not reforming institutions, or lecture bureaus.
The average man simply pines for cheerful comradeship from his wife.
He wants her to enjoy the things that he does, to like the people he
likes, to amuse herself with the things that divert him. He wants to
hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, and for her to treat him as
on a par with herself, as if they were joyous fellow sinners together,
instead of her being a living reproof to him as a poor low-browed
creature, with musical-comedy tastes that make her shudder.
Yet do you ever notice the ordinary married couple out together? It
is one of the most piteous sights on earth. The man is spending his
money trying to give his wife a good time, and she meets his noble
efforts with the rasping qualities of a crosscut saw. That is what
gives eternal pungency to the old Weber and Fields joke about the man
who, when asked if he was going to take his wife with him on a trip to
Paris, replied: “No, I am going on a pleasure excursion.”
Of course whether it is any more a woman’s place to get along with her
husband than it is his to get along with her is another fight, which I
am not trying to referee here. So also is the question of how a wife
likes to be treated. What I have tried to show is how a husband would
like his wife to pull the wool over his eyes and put on the velvet
glove before she tries to manage him—because men really enjoy being
bamboozled by women who turn out a nice artistic job. What they object
to is not being henpecked, but the raw way in which their wives do it.
II
CHARM
Over and over again girls ask me these questions: What is charm? What
is the secret of the attraction that some women have for men?
What is the “come-hither” look in the eye that some women have that
makes every man who beholds it get up and follow them?
Why do some girls always have hosts of beaux flocking about them, while
other girls just as good-looking, just as clever, just as good dancers,
just as anxious to please, never have a date or a single sweetheart to
bless themselves with?
And to all of these questions I have to answer, sadly and
disconsolately, that I do not know. I have to give up the conundrum,
which is perhaps the riddle that the Sphinx, who is partly a woman, has
brooded over through the centuries in her desert solitude, without ever
being able to solve it.
In Barrie’s delightful play, “What Every Woman Knows,” Maggie’s
brothers, discussing her with the brutal frankness with which brothers
approach the subject of a sister, agreed that she wasn’t young, nor
brilliant, and that she was homely, yet all the men were after her.
Finally one of the brothers said: “But she’s got that damned charm.”
And that was that.
When a woman has that damned charm she can snap her fingers in the face
of flappers and living pictures, and marry as early and as often as she
pleases as is witnessed by the many fat, pie-faced women we all know
who have had two, and three, or more, husbands apiece, and who still
have a waiting list in case anything untoward and fatal should happen
to the gentlemen to whom they are at present united in the holy bonds
of matrimony.
But what is this charm, what is this rabbit’s foot that some lucky
women carry, and others do not? To say that it is personality is to
attempt to explain one mystery by another mystery, for we do not know
in what personal magnetism consists, or by what power one individual
draws us, while another repulses us.
We know that it isn’t beauty, because the best lookers among girls
are seldom the most popular, and men who profess to worship beauty
are generally content to adore it from a safe distance, and show no
disposition to marry it. It is notorious that beauties seldom make good
matches. Nor does charm consist of intelligence. Being a highbrow booms
no woman’s stock, socially or matrimonially, while a witty woman cuts
her throat with her own tongue.
To be a spellbinder is for a girl’s fairy godmother to have wished a
curse instead of a blessing upon her, for no woman is more anathema to
men than the human phonograph. Even dancing, chief of accomplishments
in these jazzy days when it is of more profit for a woman to have her
brains in her heels than in her head, is but a passing attraction,
while amiability and a sweet nature, woman’s traditional one best bet,
are like a sticking plaster, potent to hold a man after marriage, but
of small value in luring him into it.
Undoubtedly, charm in its perfection is a gift of the gods, but
happily, in these days, when nature proves a cruel stepmother who is so
mean and stingy that she does not give us all that is coming to us, we
have learned to circumvent the lady. No woman need be as ugly as God
made her, nor as unattractive as she was born. Drug-store complexions
can put the inherited ones to the blush, and any girl who is willing to
take the trouble can acquire a line of lures and graces that will make
any bona fide siren tremble for her job. To the girl, then, who wishes
to acquire charm, and who especially wishes to attract men, I would
say, first, stress your femininity.
I don’t mean be namby-pamby and weepy and dish-raggy, without any
backbone. That type of woman has gone out of fashion as completely as
bustles and hoopskirts. No man now would be bored with the sort of
perfect lady his grandmother was. But the eternal feminine remains
still the eternal attraction for men, and the more womanly a woman is,
the gentler, the tenderer, the sweeter, the more she appeals to men. If
you will notice when a man speaks of the woman he loves, he invariably
calls her “little” no matter if she is six feet high and weighs 200
pounds. What he means is that she gives him the reaction of depending
upon him, of looking up to him, and that in some subtle way she
flatters his vanity by giving him the sense of masculine superiority.
You never see an aggressive, double-fisted woman, who fights her way
as a man does, get anywhere. And in his soul every man adores frills
and furbelows, and likes to see women dolled up. That is why girls make
such a terrible mistake when they ape mannish ways, and wear mannish
clothes. When a girl puts on knickerbockers she throws her trump card
into the discard.
To the girl who wishes to acquire charm I would also whisper this
secret: Make of yourself a mirror in which other people look upon
themselves. Especially let men see a flattering reflection of
themselves in your eyes. Can your own personal vanity. Listen with
bated breath while other people tell you of their exploits, but never
mention your own. Enthuse over their cars, their dogs. Marvel at their
adventures. Sympathize with their disappointments. Give the glad hand
to their successes, and you will be universally regarded as a woman of
perfect taste, wonderful insight, profound judgment, a brilliant talker
and a companion of whom one could never weary. It is the tireless
listeners, and not the endless talkers, whom men take out to dinner.
To the girl who wishes to develop charm I would likewise earnestly
recommend an intensive course of self-analysis. I would say to her:
“Study yourself. Find out what you can wear and what you cannot wear.
Find out the things that you can do and get away with, and the things
that you cannot do without making yourself appear either a dumbbell or
a figure of fun. Then, having ascertained what are your best points,
turn the spotlight on them. Emphasize them until you make everybody sit
up and take notice, so that even casual acquaintances will remember
you as the girl who always wears pink, or the girl who always dresses
in black, or the girl with the Mona Lisa smile, or the girl who is so
jolly and such a cut-up, or the girl who listens to you with such an
absorbed expression on her face that you could go on talking to her
forever. I would urge girls to try to be themselves, plus, as they
say in business, and to raise whatever charms of body, or mind, or
heart, they have to its _n_th power. That is the best way to acquire
personality, the “something different” about us that sets us apart from
every other human being, instead of our being just one of the herd.
Don’t be a copycat. Don’t understudy the mannerisms of another girl
just because she happens to be popular. Imitation airs and graces have
about as much sparkle to them as imitation diamonds. Besides, you never
can make a go of it. You can’t put on another woman’s characteristics
any more than you can her clothes, and make them seem as if they were
your own birthday suit. They are always a grotesque misfit. Charm has
to be made to order and cut to the measurement of the individual. That
is why one girl may do bold, outrageous things and everybody only
shrugs his shoulders and laughs at her, while another girl is sent to
Coventry for not doing half so much. That is why some women always have
a masculine shoulder offered for them to weep upon, while men tell
other women not to be fools whenever they shed a tear.
So the trick is for the girl to find out what her own class is and
qualify for the blue ribbon in that instead of trying to force her
way into a bunch of prize winners where she doesn’t belong and where
she will be thrown out by the judges. Yet many girls make the mistake
of doing this very thing. A quiet, serious-minded, mouse-like little
girl observes that some gay and dashing girl, who has quicksilver in
her veins and over whose lips laughter bubbles as spontaneously as a
mountain spring, is much admired and sought after and is the life of
the party wherever she goes.
“Aha! Vivacity is what makes a girl popular,” says the demure one to
herself. “I will also be sprightly, and merry, and make a hit.”
So she tries to imitate the high spirits of the gay girl, but she can’t
do it. Her home-made vivacity is as flat as home-brew beer beside
imported champagne. Instead of being bright, she is loud. Instead of
laughing, she giggles. Instead of being sprightly, she jumps around
like a monkey on a stick. She is so afraid she won’t talk enough that
she chatters incessantly, and instead of amusing people she bores them
to death.
Yet the very girl who is such a failure as a live wire could have
charmed every one if only she had given a master performance of girlish
sweetness, and gentleness, and quietness. She could have been a great
success if she had remained the shrinking violet that nature made her,
but she was a rank failure as a gaudy sunflower.
Then there is the big, Amazonian woman who tries to be cute and
cunning, because she sees some baby doll getting the glad hand when
she curls up on sofas, and sits on one foot, and perches on the edges
of tables, and who only succeeds in looking like a performing elephant
instead of a playful kitten when she performs these stunts. And there
is the woman without an inch of funny bone in her whole anatomy who
tries to tell good stories because she sees some jolly woman raconteur
set the table in a roar at dinner parties, and who wonders why people
burst into tears instead of into peals of mirth when she recites her
carefully memorized jokes.
They couldn’t fill other women’s rôles, yet the big woman could have
made us worship her as a goddess if she had stayed on her pedestal
instead of coming down and trying to do double somersaults in the
ring. We would have listened eagerly enough to intelligent talk from
a serious thinker who didn’t try to be funny, for Heaven knows we get
tired enough of amateur jokesmiths who think we want to be perpetually
tickled in the ribs. Believe me, girls, there is much wisdom in the old
proverb that advises the shoemaker to stick to his last. We are most
admirable when we are what nature made us with the aid of a few little
arts and embellishments to throw the original model up into higher
relief. So I counsel you to make the most of yourselves. Abandon the
foolish attempt of trying to make yourselves over into a poor copy of
some woman who is admired. Charm isn’t standardized. It has a million
forms, and every woman should illustrate her own particular version of
it.
After all what we call charm is largely a matter of personality and
the girl who wishes to cultivate that elusive something that we call
personality does well to pay much attention to her dress. This sounds
like superfluous advice to the sex whose brains are mostly cut on the
bias and shirred in the middle, and which is more concerned over the
hang of a skirt than it is over the state of its immortal soul. It is
not too much to say that three-fourths of women’s thoughts and interest
in life and heart-felt desires and envies are concentrated upon
clothes, and the marvel always is that they can put so much effort on a
subject and get such poor results.
For the great majority of women only think of dress in terms of
fashion, and they follow the mode of the moment as sheep follow their
leader over a wall. They wear blue or purple, pink or green, short
skirts or long skirts, tight ones or full ones, without any reference
to their complexions or whether their ankles are sylphlike or like
the legs of a piano, or whether they are living skeletons, or have
featherbed figures. The result is that thousands upon thousands of
women look as if their worst enemy had bought their clothes, and their
hats are a premeditated insult to their faces. But they go their way,
serene and happy, having done the worst they could by themselves, but
blissful in the knowledge that they are wearing what everybody else
is wearing. Apparently it never enters the average woman’s head that
by clothing herself in the feminine uniform of the hour she makes
herself indistinguishable in the mob, or that she could call attention
to herself by breaking away from it, and dressing to suit her own
particular type. Still less does it occur to her that her clothes offer
her an invaluable mode of self-expression, and that by them she can
emphasize her good points and camouflage her defects.
Yet every moving picture, every play she sees, offers a girl an object
lesson in the psychology of clothes that she does not heed. She never
asks herself why the innocent, trusting maiden, too artless for her own
good, always wears a white muslin and a blue sash; why the ingenue is
always a mass of fluffy ruffles; why the betrayed heroine always wears
a slinky black dress; why the adventuress is clothed in crimson and
spangles; why the vamp invariably wears long jade earrings, and a quart
of beads, and very little else.
Yet astute stage managers have found that the surest way to make an
audience visualize a woman in a certain way is to have her dress the
part. A girl might, of course, be as innocent in a crimson dress as
a white one; a woman might be as heartbroken in a pink silk and lace
negligee as she is in a bedraggled black alpaca, but it would take a
long argument to convince us of it, and we wouldn’t weep nearly as
freely over her woes as we do when we get an eyeful of her in the
clothes that tell us at once just what a poor, innocent, persecuted
heroine she is.
Surely this should suggest to every girl the wisdom of retiring to her
closet, and having a heart-to-heart session with her wardrobe, and a
vivisection party with her character, and thereby try to find out how
to dress her soul as well as her body, so as best and most effectively
to press-agent her individuality, so to speak.
If she is of the bold and dashing type, let her flaunt herself like a
sunflower in daring costumes and flaming colors, but if she is of the
quiet and gentle sort, soft fabrics, chiffons and laces and pastel
shades belong to her, and make her look like the traditional modest
violet that every man dreams of securing as a wife. Let the girl who
is flat-chested and athletic rejoice in her sport clothes. That is her
note, and brings out a certain piquant boyishness which is her greatest
attraction. But let the girl who is plump, with gracious curves, make
the most of her femininity by decking herself out in the frilliest
frocks that she can find. Each will lose in charm if she swaps her
plumage for the other’s.
Dangling ornaments, floating ribbons and jingling bracelets belong to
the gay and foolish and frivolous, but they detract from the dignity of
the stately, thoughtful, serious-minded woman. A tailor-made suit is
equal to a certificate of virtue, and when a girl is applying for a job
a plain, dark-colored suit will do more to land her the position than a
gilt-edged reference. Nobody ever believes that a girl in a low-necked,
no-sleeved frock can ever be a competent business woman. She doesn’t
look it. Every woman knows that her eyes seem twice as blue if she
has a blue lining to her hat, and that she can turn a spotlight on
her every freckle by wearing a spotted dress. In the same way she can
bring out her characteristics by the way she dresses. If she wishes to
emphasize her cuteness, she can do it by dressing like a baby doll.
If she wishes to be thought a goddess, she can add to her divinity
by long-trailing robes. If she wishes to be thought a good sport and
treated as a pal by men, sport clothes are hers, while if domesticity
is her long suit, she can turn the trick by wearing ruffled little
white aprons at home. So study your type, girls, and dress the part,
if you want to make the most of the attractions with which nature has
endowed you.
III
THE ORDINARY WOMAN
I wish that I had the distributing of some of the Carnegie medals for
heroes. I would give one to just the Ordinary Woman. It is true that
she never manned a lifeboat in a stormy sea, or plunged into a river
to save a drowning person. It is true that she never stopped a runaway
horse, or dashed into a burning building, or gave any other spectacular
exhibition of courage.
She has only stood at her post thirty, or forty, or fifty years,
fighting sickness and poverty and loneliness, and disappointment so
quietly, with such a Spartan fortitude that the world has never noticed
her achievements. Yet, in the presence of the Ordinary Woman, the
battle-scarred veteran, with his breast covered with medals signifying
valor, may well stand uncovered before one braver than he.
There is nothing high and heroic in her appearance. She is just a
commonplace woman, plainly dressed, with a tired face and work-worn
hands—the kind of woman that you meet a hundred times a day upon the
street without ever giving her a second glance, still less saluting
her as a heroine. Nevertheless, as much as the bravest soldier, she
is entitled to the cross of the Legion of Honor for distinguished
gallantry on the Battlefield of Life.
Years and years ago, when she was fresh and young, and gay, and
light-hearted, she was married. Her head, as is the case with most
girls, was full of dreams. Her husband was to be a Prince Charming,
always tender and considerate and loving, shielding her from every care
and worry. Life itself was to be a fairy tale.
One by one the dreams fell away. The husband was a good man, but he
grew indifferent to her before long. He ceased to notice when she put
on a fresh ribbon. He never paid her the little compliments for which
a woman’s soul hungers. He never gave her a kiss or a caress, and
their married life sank into a deadly monotony that had no romance to
brighten it, no joy or love to lighten it.
Day after day she sewed and cooked and cleaned and mended to make a
comfortable home for a man who did not even give her the poor pay of a
few words of appreciation. At his worst he was cross and querulous. At
his best he was silent, and would gobble his food like a hungry animal
and subside into his paper, leaving her to spend a dull and monotonous
evening after a dull and monotonous day.
The husband was not one of the fortunate few who have the gift of
making money. He worked hard, but opportunity does not smile on every
man, and the wolf was never very far away from their door.
Women know the worst of poverty. It is the wife, who has the spending
of the insufficient family income, who learns all the bitter ways of
scrimping and paring and saving. The husband must present a decent
appearance, for policy’s sake, when he goes to business; certain things
are necessities for the children; and so the heaviest of all the
deprivations fall upon the woman who stays at home and strives to make
one dollar do the work of five.
That is the way of the Ordinary Woman; and what sacrifices she makes,
what tastes she crucifies, what longings for pretty things and dainty
things she smothers, not even her own family guess. They think it is an
eccentricity that makes her choose the neck of the chicken and the hard
end of the loaf and to stay at home from any little outing. Ah, if they
only knew!
For each of her children she trod the Gethsemane of woman, only to go
through that slavery of motherhood which the woman endures who is too
poor to hire competent nurses. For years and years she never knew what
it was to have a single night’s unbroken sleep. The small hours of the
morning found her walking the colic, or nursing the croup, or covering
restless little sleepers, or putting water to thirsty little lips.
There was no rest for her, day or night. There was always a child in
her arms or clinging to her skirts. Oftener than not she was sick and
nerve-worn and weary almost to death, but she never failed to rally to
the call of “Mother!” as a good soldier rallies to his battle-cry.
Nobody called her brave, and yet, when one of the children came down
with malignant diphtheria, she braved death a hundred times, in bending
over the little sufferer, without one thought of danger. And when the
little one was laid away under the sod, she who had loved most was the
first to gather herself together and take up the burden of life for the
others.
The supreme moment of the Ordinary Woman’s life, however, came when she
educated her children above herself and lifted them out of her sphere.
She did this with deliberation. She knew that in sending her bright boy
and talented girl off to college she was opening up to them paths in
which she could not follow; she knew that the time would come when they
would look upon her with pitying tolerance or contempt, or perhaps—God
help her!—be ashamed of her.
But she did not falter in her self-sacrifice. She worked a little
harder, she denied herself a little more, to give them the advantages
that she never had. In this she was only like millions of other
Ordinary Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at
sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate
their children—digging with their own hands the chasm that will
separate them almost as much as death itself would.
Wherefore I say the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life.
IV
TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER
Are you teaching your children to love and admire their father? Do you
ceaselessly point out to your children their father’s good qualities?
Do you hold their father up as a hero before your children’s eyes? Do
you teach your children to appreciate their father? If you do not,
you are not giving your husband a fair deal, nor a run for his money.
Fatherhood calls for just as many sacrifices as motherhood does. The
only coin in which these can be repaid is affection and gratitude, and
if he is defrauded of these he is poor indeed.
From the time the first baby is born the average man becomes literally
the slave of his family. He sells himself into bondage so that his
children may live soft; that they may have advantages that he never
had in his youth; that they may enjoy luxuries he never knew. He works
overtime and grows prematurely old and bent, that his boys may go to
college and belong to smart clubs and have automobiles, and that his
daughters may attend fashionable schools, and dress like fashion
plates, and go in the right circles.
It is father who stays at home and works through hot summers and cold
winters, when the family goes to Europe. It is father who wears the
shabbiest clothes. It is father who has the worst room and the smallest
closet space in the home. The percentage of money that father spends
on himself and in gratifying his own personal tastes and desires is
negligible. Virtually all the money he has earned by a lifetime of hard
toil has been lavished on his family.
Whether this pays or not, whether all of this labor and anxiety and
self-denial have been worthless or not, depends altogether on his
children’s attitude toward him. If they love him; if they are grateful
to him; if they appreciate what he has done for them, it is the best
investment that a man ever made, and it makes him richer than any
millionaire. But if his children are indifferent and callous; if they
take all that he has done for them as no more than their due, and
without even a “thank you”; if they see in him nothing but a shabby
little man who hasn’t been particularly successful as a moneymaker,
then all his life work goes for nothing. His sacrifices are without
reward. He is bankrupt in heart.
Now, the attitude of children toward their father is almost entirely
determined by their mother; and whether they look upon him as a
superior being to be adored and worshiped, or merely as a cash register
that they can punch whenever they want any money, depends altogether
upon what she has taught them. There are women who teach their children
to hate and fear their father by making him an ogre to them. When the
children are bad the little culprits are always threatened with what
their father will do to them. The mother thus makes the father the
hanging judge who inflicts punishment on the small sinners.
In this way the mother fills the child’s imagination with a picture of
its father as of some dread creature who is always lying in wait to
chastise him, and who could never have any sympathy or understanding
with him, and with whom he could never have any possible companionship.
“I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home,” is the curse that
millions of women lay between their children and their husbands, and
that seals the children’s hearts forever against the fathers who have
given them their very life blood.
There are other women who teach their children to regard their fathers
simply as money-making machines that exist solely for their own use and
benefit. What the children want they must have at any cost to father,
and mother undertakes to nag it out of him. The children see that
mother has no consideration for father and they grow up to have none.
She never tells them that they must not even ask for something they
desire because business is bad and their father is harassed and worried
about money. She never tells them that they must stay at home and let
father have a little trip, because he is sick and nerve-worn. She lets
them wring the last penny out of him with no more feeling for him than
if he were some sort of automatic device worked by her for supplying
their desires and needs.
Other women teach their children to despise their fathers by always
criticizing them and calling attention to their faults. They are
forever telling the children that their fathers are lacking in
enterprise, that they are poor business men, that they are too easy
and let people take advantage of them, that they are high-tempered and
hard to get along with, that they have this and that weakness, until
the child’s mind is thoroughly poisoned with the idea that his father
amounts to nothing and his opinions are not to be respected.
Very few women ever deliberately set themselves to teach their children
to love and appreciate their fathers. Very few women ever try to make
their children see their fathers as heroes who, for their sakes, are
fighting the battle of life as bravely and gallantly as any knight of
old. Very few women teach their children to show any gratitude to the
fathers who have sacrificed so much for them. Why so many women fail
in this important duty is partly through carelessness and a lack of
thought, but mostly because of an unconscious mother jealousy. They
want to be first with their children and monopolize their love. But it
is a cruel thing to the child, and to the father. It robs them both of
so much joy in each other that they miss.
V
STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY
I get hundreds upon hundreds of letters from disgruntled wives
bemoaning their fates. They tell me that they are sick and weary of
the monotony of domestic drudgery; that they have few amusements;
that their husbands are indifferent to them and never pay them any
compliments or show them any affection; that their husbands find fault
with them for their every mistake, but never give them one word of
praise for all the good work they do.
And these women have brooded over the hardships of their lot until they
have grown morbid and they see the world as one great gob of gloom,
with themselves as the blackest spot in it.
Without doubt, marriage is a cruel and a bitter disappointment to
nine-tenths of those who enter into the holy estate. Especially is it
disillusioning to women because they build such impossible hopes upon
it, and go into it with such a blind faith that they are going to find
it an earthly paradise.
It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her lifelong knowledge
of the daily life her mother has led and her observation of the
domestic strife in the households of her married friends and neighbors,
every girl honestly believes that her own matrimonial venture will be a
perpetual picnic, and that the man she marries will remain the perfect
lover.
Of course, it doesn’t happen, and when the woman finds out that her
own marriage brings her more kicks than ha’pence; when she realizes
that she must share the common lot; when she has to bend her back to
the hard and dreary labor of making a family comfortable, for which
she gets neither the glad hand nor a pay envelope, and when she has to
put up with a man who seems to have cornered the whole visible supply
of pure cussedness, why, it gets upon her nerves, and she feels like
flunking it.
So she beats upon her breast and cries out that this is not the
marriage of which she dreamed. This sordid existence is not what she
married for.
Of course, it isn’t. But it is marriage as it is. None of us realize
our ideals. Our dreams never come true. And even when we get what we
want, it is so warped and twisted that it is no longer the object of
our desires, and we have paid for it more than it is worth. That is
life.
To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of homely counsel:
Sit down, sisters, and have a real heart-to-heart session with your own
souls. Put out of your mind firmly and for all time the idiotic idea
that there is any lot of perfect peace and happiness, any road you
might have traveled that is not strewn with tacks. Worry and anxiety
and sickness and sorrow and disappointment and loneliness are the
portion alike of the highest and the lowest, and you cannot escape the
human lot. It is life.
Then take a calm and dispassionate survey of your own situation. You
will find your work tiresome and monotonous. So does every other person
in the world find his or hers. The thing we do for our daily bread is
bound to become a grind. Do you think for a moment that the banker
doesn’t get sick and weary of grappling with credits and loans; that
the author doesn’t have to flog himself to his desk; that the actor
doesn’t weary of the lines he has said over thousands of times; that
the film star is not nauseated with grease paint?
Every one thrills to his task at first as you did to your new pots and
pans and bridal furniture. But the novelty wears off, and then comes
the long, grim stretch of carrying on, because it is your job to which
you have set your hand and which you mean to make a good job just
because it is yours. That is life.
You complain that your husband takes your good work as a matter of
course, but he howls loud and long over your mistakes. That is what
happens to all workers. If you were a stenographer and spelled one
word wrong; if you were a saleswoman and made one error in your
calculations, your boss would pass over the thousands of words you had
spelled correctly and the hundreds of good sales you had made, to call
you down for your blunder.
If you were a writer or an actor, you would find that the critics would
forget all the good work you had done to call attention to the weakness
of your new book, or bemoan the performance you gave in a new part. As
long as we walk straight no one notices it, but when we fall off the
path we attract attention. It is life.
These unhappy wives ask, “What shall I do?” and one knows not how
to answer the question. To tell them that, if they are patient and
forbearing, and go on doing their duty as wives, they can change mean
husbands into good ones is to tell them a wicked lie, and mislead them
with false hopes. The leopard changes his spots just about as often as
a man does his disposition, and I have yet to see the tightwad become
generous; the surly, glum man turn into a ray of sunshine in his home;
or the hard, cold, selfish man become the perfect lover to his wife.
Nor is divorce the solution of the unhappy wife’s problem. Marriage
is not an episode of which you can say when you get a divorce, “This
unpleasant chapter of my life is ended. I will shut the book, and
forget all about it, and be perfectly happy henceforth.” Marriage sets
its ineffaceable seal upon a woman, it colors her whole life; and
divorce can no more give her back her lost joy, and faith, and trust,
than it can restore her lost girlhood.
Besides, there are nearly always children to consider; children whose
welfare a good mother places above her own; children for whom a home
must be kept together; children who must be educated; who must be
started in life, who need a father’s support and control. Divorce
is not for the woman with children unless conditions are absolutely
intolerable. And for the woman herself divorce is often a jumping out
of the frying pan into the fire, for when she finds that she is rid
of an unkind husband, she has to face a world that is unkinder still.
Generally the woman has no private fortune. The courts award her but
a meager alimony, and the collecting of that is generally about the
hardest job on earth. She is trained to no business or occupation.
Nobody wants her services, and she comes to know that the grumbling of
an ill-tempered husband is no harder to endure than the howl of the
wolf outside of her door.
Perhaps the best advice that one can offer these unhappy wives is to
try to forget what they expected of marriage, and to just put it on
a business basis, so much for so much, with a settled determination
to make the best of a bad bargain. Their little flier in Heart’s
Consolidated hasn’t paid the dividends they expected it to. Well, our
speculations seldom do. Their matrimonial partners have proved hard to
get along with. Well, many business men endure cranky men partners, who
rasp their nerves, for the sake of the good of the firm.
And on the credit side of the ledger the unhappy wife can set this
down, that she has, at least, her home, and her settled position in
society, and they are great gain. It takes years and years of struggle
and striving for the lone woman to reach the goal where she can have
her own house, and gather about her the household gods that women
worship, and that bless one by their presence.
I am not arguing that a woman would consider a house, no matter if it
were a palace, a satisfactory substitute for a tender, loving husband,
but I am trying to induce the woman who has an indifferent husband to
realize that she is not half as badly off as she thinks she is, as long
as she has her creature comforts.
Fortunately, the law of compensation always holds. The man who is a
poor husband is often a good provider. Flirtatious husbands often atone
for their sidesteppings with diamonds and furs. Stingy ones leave women
rich widows. Even grouches leave their wives free to amuse themselves
in their own way. After all, life is a series of compromises. If we
don’t get the best, we are very foolish to throw away the second
best and the wise woman who finds marriage a failure doesn’t go into
physical and spiritual bankruptcy. She gets the best out of what she
has. She makes the most of her bargain.
All of which just boils down into this: Dry your eyes on your best
embroidered towels, O ye disgruntled sisters, and realize that you are
not so unfortunate as you think you are, and what you are called upon
to bear is just life.
VI
JEALOUSY
A woman wants to know if there is any cure for jealousy. She says that
she knows her husband loves her devotedly. He is true and faithful to
her. He is as domesticated as the house cat and casts no roving eye
at the pretty flappers. Nevertheless, every time he speaks to another
woman she endures grinding torments of suspicion.
There is only one cure for jealousy. That is to use a little common
sense, but this puts the remedy out of the reach of the green-eyed,
because jealousy is a form of insanity.
It is a lack of mental balance that makes people imagine things that
do not exist, that causes them to see deep, dark plots in the most
innocent acts and that makes them deliberately torture themselves by
believing that the ones that they love most are traitors to them. Also,
it is what the alienists call “the exaggerated ego” that makes any man
or woman believe that he or she can supply another individual’s whole
need of human companionship.
For jealousy isn’t confined solely to lovers. Some of the most acute
attacks are the jealousy that men and women feel for their in-laws.
Sometimes parents are even jealous of their own children. Wives are
often jealous of their husband’s business, and always jealous of the
old friends of their bachelor days. But however and wherever it is, and
no matter how causeless and needless it may be, jealousy poisons the
life and ruins the happiness of all of those who indulge in it. It is
the source of endless quarrels between husbands and wives, and it slays
love quicker than any other one thing. Indeed, the jealous bring down
the curse they fear upon their own heads.
By their suspicions the jealous materialize the very thing they most
dread, for there is no surer way of driving a man or a woman into
philandering than by keeping dangling continually before his or her
eyes a romantic possibility in which he or she is likely to indulge
at any moment. Many a married man would never think of himself as
a lady-killer—in fact, he would consider that he was married and
settled, and done with sentimental episodes, except that his wife
keeps alive his belief in himself as a heart-smasher by her jealousy.
If she considers him so fascinating that she is afraid to let him
have a casual conversation with another woman, or take a turn around
a ballroom floor with a pretty girl, he argues that he must be some
sheik. And so he buys him some Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes and sets his
hat on the side of his head and proceeds to justify her once groundless
suspicions.
Furthermore, jealousy is its own undoing, because it strikes a death
blow at our personal liberty, which is dearer to us and more necessary
to our happiness than any man or woman ever is. None of us likes to be
called upon to furnish an alibi. None of us enjoys being put through a
questionnaire about everything that was said to us and everything we
said. None of us but resents not being free to go and come as we like
within reasonable bounds and to hold ordinary social intercourse with
any one we choose. So if husbands and wives went about deliberately
to kill every particle of affection that their mates have for them,
they could take no better way to do it than by spying upon them, by
attributing unworthy motives to them, by curtailing their freedom and
by making such jealous scenes that, for the sake of peace, they are
forced to lie and deceive. Besides, jealousy is an unforgivable insult.
There are women who have conniption fits every time their husbands make
themselves agreeable to their dinner partners or take a chance-met
old woman friend out to lunch. There are wives who never believe that
their husbands can admire a beautiful woman or enjoy the society of
a brilliant one innocently. They attribute the basest motives to the
men they love and accuse them not only of being faithless, but of the
grossest animalism, which was far and away from the thoughts of the
poor gentlemen.
Finally, jealousy is an indication of the inferiority complex. The
woman who is jealous of all other women in her heart believes them all
her superiors. She believes them better looking, more intelligent,
more charming, with more attraction for her husband than she has. That
is why she is so afraid of their getting him away from her. You can’t
imagine a queen being jealous of a milkmaid or a Lillian Russell being
jealous of an ugly duckling, or a star dancer not being willing to
have her husband to tread a measure with some lump of a girl who would
walk all over his feet. All of this being true, then, the way to cure
jealousy is to apply common sense to the situation. Try to look at it
fairly and squarely. In the first place, your husband or wife wouldn’t
have married you if he or she hadn’t preferred you to every one else
in the world. If you had charm before marriage you have it still, if
you will take the trouble to use it. In the second place, you know that
you enjoy talking to other people, and that your contact with them is
perfectly harmless. Why not believe your husband or wife is as decent
as you are? In the third place, why keep your husband or wife always
fed up with the idea that he or she is a fascinator that no woman or
man can resist? It makes them want to try and see if they can stand
them up. And lastly, if you are married to a man or woman whom you
believe to have so little truth and honor, and who cares so little for
you that he or she can’t be trusted out of your sight, why worry about
him or about her? He or she isn’t worth a single pang of jealousy.
VII
HAVE A GOAL
The great trouble with the majority of women is that they have no
plan of life, no real objective. They are the victims of fads. They
wobble about from interest to interest. The thing they were crazy about
yesterday they throw into the discard to-day. They waste their time,
and energy, and ability in pursuing will-o’-the-wisps. Like the hero of
the popular song, they are on their way, but they don’t know where they
are going.
This is why so many women fail, as is abundantly proved by the fact
that when a woman does make up her mind about what she wants to do,
when she has one settled ambition instead of a lot of vague desires,
she is almost invariably successful. Let her once determine to tread a
definite path and she not only arrives, but she arrives with bells on.
Of course, the reason that women tackle the business of existence in
this hit-or-miss fashion is not really their fault, poor dears. It is
because of the idiotic way in which we bring up girls on the assumption
that each one has a regiment of fairy godmothers and guardian angels
looking after her and taking care of her, so that she doesn’t need
to bother her pretty little head about learning how to take care of
herself. So we don’t teach a girl, as we do a boy, that our lives are
just what we make them, that we are the architects of our own fate, and
that whether our lives are ugly, and botchy, and of little worth, or
beautiful, and well-rounded, and valuable, depends upon our having some
plan of life in our heads and working to it.
We tell the boy that he who is jack-of-all-trades is good at none, and
that if he wishes to be a carpenter, or a master plumber, or a bank
president, or a surgeon, he must serve his apprenticeship in his chosen
trade or profession and concentrate on the study of it if he means to
succeed. He will never get anywhere as long as he goes from job to job
and dabbles first at one thing and then at another. But we don’t teach
girls that it is just as important for them to have some definite plan
of life and prepare themselves to do some particular work as it is for
their brothers. Most girls in these days have to earn their own living
until they are married. But most of them do just as little work as they
can get by with, and they do this little aimlessly.
Here and there is a stenographer who works by a plan. She has set
herself to become a highly paid private secretary. Here and there is a
shop-girl who has her eye on a buyer’s job and trips to Europe. Here
and there is a milliner or a dressmaker whose dream is of her own shop.
Here and there is a boarding-house keeper whose ambition it is to run
a hotel. Very seldom do these women fail to attain their desires. They
know what they are trying to do and they make every lick of work count.
They bend every energy to one end instead of wasting it on a hundred
ineffectual endeavors. They put their backs, their hearts, their brains
into their work and that combination invariably spells success.
But the great majority of working women simply potter purposelessly
along. They don’t expect to do what they are doing very long, and
so they don’t take the trouble to try to learn how to do it well.
They have no interest in their work, no ambition. They haven’t even
bothered to pick out the thing to do for which they have a natural
aptitude. They have taken up the occupation they follow just because
they happened to do so. They don’t give a single lobe of their brain to
studying it or trying to fit themselves to be competent. They take life
as casually as that. Yet they may have to do this same work for thirty
or forty years, for it is by no means certain that every girl will get
a husband or that the husband will be able to support her if she does
get him.
Women do not even have any plan about following the great career of
wifehood and motherhood to which they all look forward. Probably every
girl who goes to the altar desires to be a good wife and mother. But
she does not crystallize these vague intentions into any concrete
plan of action. Not one woman in a thousand sits down in her bridal
bungalow or apartment and works out a scheme for handling her husband
without friction, for running her house economically and for making
her marriage a success. On the contrary, she trusts it all to luck. If
she is a good housekeeper, she feeds her husband well. If she doesn’t
like to cook, she gives him dyspepsia by sitting him down to dinners
of underdone meat and overdone bread and watery vegetables. If she
is amiable and good-natured, she gets along with him. If she is high
tempered, she rows with him. If she is thrifty, she saves his money and
they prosper. If she is extravagant, she runs him into debt.
It is because wives have no plan about what they do as wives that
matrimony is such a gamble. And it is the same way about motherhood.
There is no other thought in the world so terrible as that mothers
bring up their children without any plan about what they are trying
to make them. They are shaping an immortal soul, and they don’t even
know what they are trying to make of it. That is the capital crime of
aimlessness. Women will never succeed until they conquer this weakness
and learn how to plan their lives. You cannot do anything effectively
unless you know what you are trying to do.
VIII
THE GOAT FAMILY
Kind reader, meet my friends, the Goats. They are not rich, for, altho
Mr. Goat has been an able and energetic business man all his life, and
Mrs. Goat has been a thrifty housekeeper, they have never been able to
get much ahead because they have always had such a horde of parasites
to support. Ever since they had a home they have run a free hotel. They
have literally been eaten out of house and home by self-invited guests,
by forty-seventh cousins who always cashed in the blood relationship
for board and lodging, and by old friends who suddenly remembered, when
they happened to be in their town, how they loved the Goats and hated
to pay for their own beds and meals.
Any one of their many acquaintances who wished to take a vacation
without expense, or have an operation performed, or go to the opera,
or see the sights of the city, just wished himself or herself on the
Goats, and arrived bag and baggage to camp in the spare bedroom. And
that was all there was to it; a pleasant and economical arrangement so
far as the guests were concerned. And if it was inconvenient to the
Goats and they had to sleep around on cots and do without new clothes
to pay for the food that the deadbeats gobbled up, why, nobody bothered
about that. And the Goats never complained. They never made a move to
chuck these grafters out, not even rich Cousin Susan, who could have
bought the family up a hundred times over, when she came and stayed six
months, wore Mother Goat to a frazzle waiting on her and ran them into
debt because she couldn’t eat anything but the most expensive foods.
No, they feel that it would be a stain on their escutcheon to assert
themselves and look out for themselves a little, and so they lived up
to the Goat coat-of-arms, which is a doormat couchant, with everybody
trampling over it.
By and by the eldest Miss Goat got married. Her husband proved to
be a bumptious, egotistical, opinionated fellow, and when he was
about the whole Goat family had to walk on eggs and suppress all
their own opinions and tastes to avoid irritating him. Indeed, when
their daughter married, the Goats acquired a new son, as the phrase
goes, because every Sunday and on high days and holidays the young
couple arrived to take dinner with papa and mamma. It was so sweet
to be all together at such times, and it was also so economical and
saved them the work and worry of getting their own dinner. Then the
son Billy got married. Not being born a Goat, Billy’s wife had not
the suffer-and-be-strong complex in her. On the contrary, she was a
go-getter, and what she wanted she had to have. Therefore, Father Goat
was often called on for money to help pay Mrs. Billy’s bills, which had
to be met regardless of what sacrifice it entailed on the Goats at home.
Mrs. Billy died, and, of course, Billy took his motherless children,
one of them a tiny baby, back home for mother and sister to take care
of. They did it for a few years, until Billy married again, altho it
reduced poor, worn-out mother to a physical wreck. The family didn’t
approve of Billy’s choice of a second wife, but, with the Goat faculty
for swallowing anything, they accepted her and felt that at least
one burden would be removed from them and that Billy would take his
children and set up his own home.
It appears, however, that the second wife refuses to be bothered with
stepchildren, and so Billy has brought his brood back for mother and
sister to rear and support. It takes all the money he can make to
provide for his wife and her relatives whom she has saddled upon him.
Mother Goat says that no sacrifice is too great to make for her
darling son, nor does she hesitate to offer up as a burnt offering
her unmarried daughter, Nanny Goat, who labors in an office all day
to make the money to help maintain the family, and who comes home at
night and does most of the housework.
But Nanny is beginning to show un-Goatlike traits. She doesn’t see why
she should work to feed a lot of bum company who sponge on them instead
of paying their own board somewhere. She doesn’t see why she should
spend her Sundays and holidays, cooking dinners for sister and brother
and the in-laws when they might just as well eat at home or go to a
restaurant. And she doesn’t see what right brother has to foist the
care of his children and their support on his old parents and his young
sister.
“I am spending my life slaving for other people and bearing other
people’s burdens,” wails poor little Nanny Goat. “I earn a good salary,
but I can never have any pretty clothes or indulge myself in any of the
amusements I crave, because all my money is spent on people who just
make a convenience of us, and who think more of being invited somewhere
else to tea than they do of living on us without cost for a month. All
my youth, when I ought to have the pleasures of the young, is being
given to trying to raise my brother’s children, and do for them the
things that he himself is too weak and pusillanimous to do. And I am
sick and tired of it. I am tired of supporting grafters that are more
able to work than I am. I am sick of being bled white by blood-suckers.
I am sore at having to do other people’s duty for them, and I want to
know how I can get out of being a perpetual Goat as long as I live.”
Alas! poor little Nanny, it is easier for the leopard to change its
spots than it is for one who was born a Goat to cease being one. Still,
the thing can be done, if you have nerve enough to butt your way to
freedom. Shut the door in the face of the deadbeat visitors. Make your
brother act the part of a man and assume his own responsibilities. And
you will find that you have gained not only relief but that you have
gone up a hundred per cent in every one’s esteem.
For while we all make use of the Goat family, we hold them in contempt
because they let us make goats of them.
IX
SPOILING A WIFE
A man asks: “Can a husband be too good to his wife?” Yes. A husband
can be too good to his wife. So can a wife be too good to her husband.
Husbands and wives are just as easily spoiled as babies are, and
they react to spoiling exactly the same way that babies do. They
become peevish, and fretful, and unreasonable. They howl for the
moon. The more they are given in to, the more they demand and the
more unrelenting their tyranny becomes. They smash things in sheer
wantonness, and they need nothing on earth so much as to be turned
across somebody’s knee and given a good spanking, and made to behave
themselves.
All of us know plenty of men and women, with many fine and noble
qualities, who would have made splendid husbands and wives if they had
not been badly spoiled by their overindulgent wives and husbands. But
instead of being disciplined, and forced to control themselves, and
made to act like reasonable human beings, they had their weaknesses
indulged, their selfishness encouraged, their exactions given in
to, until they became a curse to themselves and to those who had the
misfortune to be married to them.
Of course, when my correspondent speaks of a man being “good” to his
wife, he means it in the sense of being indulgent to her. No man can
be too good to his wife in the way of being kind, and tender, and
sympathetic, and just, and fair to her. But he is not good to her—in
fact, he does her a cruel wrong—when he is overly indulgent to her. He
ruins her life no less than his own because the spoiled wife is never
happy. She is always discontented, restless, dissatisfied, wanting
something she hasn’t got and that is just beyond her reach. She thinks
only of herself, and her pleasures, and the self-centered can always
find flaws in their lot. The only contented wives are those who are
doing their part toward making their marriage a success. The grafting
wives are always whiny, and complaining, and disgruntled.
A man, for instance, is too good to his wife when he lets her lie down
on her end of the matrimonial partnership. His part of the contract
is to work and make the money to support a home. Her part is to make
a comfortable home. There are many women who refuse to do this, and
who force their husbands to live around in boarding houses and hotels.
There are many more women who are so lazy and shiftless that they keep
their houses as dirty as pigstys, and never give their husbands a meal
that isn’t a first-aid to the undertaker. There are men who have to get
up and get their own breakfasts before they start to business, while
their good-for-nothing wives slumber and sleep. There are men who have
to come home after a hard day’s work and help get the dinner, and wash
the dishes, and bathe the baby, and sweep the floors, and do all the
housework that their trifling wives have left undone.
Nothing but being a bedridden invalid excuses a woman for not doing her
share of the work and for not feeding her family on properly cooked
food, and any man is very silly who puts up with slack housekeeping
from an able-bodied wife. She would get busy quickly enough with the
broom and the cookbook if she knew she would lose her job unless she
made her man comfortable.
A man is too good to his wife—or too bad to her—when he lets her ruin
him with her extravagance. There are men of ability, men who are
industrious, men who are filled with ambition and who were on the high
road to success when they married. But they got spenders and wasters
for wives, and thereafter their lives became just a frantic struggle
to keep even with the bill collector. Strive as they would, they could
never get ahead. They had to let every opportunity pass them because
they never had a cent to put into any enterprise. Every dollar had
gone to pay for the wife’s clothes, and entertaining, and trying to
keep up with people better off than they.
The man who never says “No” to his wife’s ceaseless demands on his
pocketbook may think that he is being good to her, but in reality
he could do her no worse turn. For you can no more satisfy a greedy
woman than you can a greedy child. Such women are the daughters of the
Scriptural horse leech, forever crying: “More, more, more!” And in the
end, when the crash comes, the extravagant wife is crushed under the
ruin she has brought upon her household.
A man is too good to his wife when he makes all of the sacrifices and
she monopolizes all of the privileges. There are households in which
the husband has no rights or consideration whatever. He goes shabby,
while wife is arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. He walks, while
wife rides around in a limousine. He stays at home, while wife goes
forth to summer and winter resorts. His tastes, his comfort, his
pleasure are never considered. He cultivates selfishness in his wife
by never demanding a square deal from her and by never making her give
as well as take. And his reward is his wife’s contempt, for no woman
respects a man upon whom she can wipe her feet.
Oh, yes, a man can easily be too good to his wife. The really good
husbands are not those who make spoiled babies of their wives, but
those who encourage their wives to develop into self-controlled,
helpful, useful women.
X
THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS
One of the most pathetic things on earth is the unnecessary unhappiness
we endure. The big, heartbreaking tragedies no one may escape. The loss
of those we love. Frustrated hopes. Disappointments. Despair. These are
the inevitable portion of humanity, and there is dignity in meeting
them with courage.
But to have your life poisoned by the sting of a gnat; to be done
to death by pin pricks, to be robbed of your happiness by petty
aggravations, that is a different matter, and one rages alike against
the futility of it, and the ignominy of it. And, curiously enough, we
neither endure with fortitude these little, petty ills that spoil the
peace of our days, nor do we try to seek a remedy for them.
Take family troubles, for example, which are responsible for more real,
heartbreaking, never-ending misery than anything else in the world. A
man and a woman drawn together by some fleeting physical attraction get
married. When that is over, they find that they have not one thing on
earth in common. Their tastes differ on everything from politics to
pie. Their every idea and opinion is antagonistic. They do not think
the same thoughts, or speak the same language. They may be people of
the highest integrity, models of all the virtues. They may try to do
their duty nobly and with self-sacrifice. But their home is a dark and
bloody battleground where they fight over every topic like dogs over a
bone, and they make life a hell on earth for each other.
Sometimes parents and children cannot get along together. Sometimes
a nice, domestic old hen hatches out a swan. Sometimes a swan finds
that nature has bestowed an ugly duckling upon her, and great is the
clacking, and the clucking, and the feather-picking around the barnyard.
Often brothers and sisters cannot agree. They clash on every subject
under the sun. They express their opinions of each other with the
brutal candor of near relationship, and leave each other sullen and
sore with resentment. They never sit down to a meal without being
verbally armed to the teeth, and the maimed survivors feel as if they
had been through the battle of the Marne. Sometimes there is just one
particular member of a family who is a perpetual storm center, and who
has but to blow in at the door to shatter the peace and harmony of the
household.
Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic people is the
greatest affliction that can possibly befall us. Nothing compensates
for it. Not tho we dwell in a palace, with every meal a banquet, and
have everything that money can buy us. Better it is to dwell on a
housetop, or in a lodging house, and eat at a quick lunch place, and
have peace, than abide in splendor with those who irritate the very
soul out of us.
Nor are we consoled by the fact that the very people who are so
impossible to live with love us well enough to die for us.
We know well enough that it is mother’s affection for us, and her
anxiety about us, that makes her nag us incessantly, and hand out
advice to us until we are ready to scream. In their philosophical
moments men and women realize that even their in-laws knock them for
their own good.
But it is the result, and not the theory, with which we are concerned,
and as you listen to the wail of those who cry out against uncongenial
marriages, and the moans of anguish of the in-laws who dwell under
the same roof, and listen to the sounds of fratricidal strife, when
everybody could be so happy if they didn’t have to live with each
other, you wonder that so few people have the wisdom and the courage to
apply the one sure cure for their misery. That is to separate. Apart
they would be happy. They would even love each other. They would get a
perspective on each other’s good qualities. But living together they
merely get on each other’s nerves, and hate each other.
The old idea that blood is thicker than water, and that just
because you happen to be born in a certain relationship to a group
of individuals makes you automatically love them, and desire their
society, hasn’t a word of truth in it. It is not even true in the
relationship between parents and children.
As long as their children are young and helpless, most mothers have
an animal fondness for them. But when they are older, it very often
happens that a mother cannot get along in peace with her children. She
does not understand them. She has nothing in common with them, and she
is glad enough when they are grown and leave home.
No theory has been more mischievous than the old convention that people
who were of the same family had to keep on living together, no matter
how much they rubbed each other the wrong way, nor how unpleasant this
enforced companionship was. There is no sense in doing it. No rhyme
nor reason for it. Because Aunt Jane is Aunt Jane is no reason why you
should take her into your home and be bored the balance of your life
by her reminiscences, nor is there any reason why you should have your
temper continually rasped by antagonistic sisters and brothers when
there are plenty of agreeable strangers in the world.
Try the absence cure on your domestic troubles. Get up and leave an
unpleasant home. You have no idea how much better you will love a lot
of your relatives when you put about a thousand miles between you and
them.
XI
THE DEADLY RIVAL
It would be interesting to know how many estranged husbands and wives
began drifting apart with the advent of the first baby. Children
are popularly supposed to be the tie that binds a man and woman
indissolubly together in body and spirit in marriage. Often this is
true, and in their love and hopes and ambitions for their children
a husband and wife literally do become “two souls with but a single
thought, two hearts that beat as one.” Also very often for the sake of
their children men and women endure a marriage that they have come to
loathe and hate, and are bound together like prisoners whose balls and
chains clank at every movement they make.
Unhappily, children’s hands do not always draw husbands and wives
closer together. They just as often push them apart, and when this
happens it is oftener the woman’s fault than the man’s. Few men prefer
their children above their wives, but for the great majority of women
their husbands exist only as their children’s father and as purveyors
to their children.
The first baby definitely and for all time puts the husband’s nose out
of joint. Up to that time, husband has been king of the domestic realm.
His wife has put on her prettiest clothes and adorned herself for him.
She has been chum and playmate. She has exerted herself to amuse and
entertain him. She has looked out for his comfort, has seen that he
had the best of everything, and he has reveled in the bliss of having
the center of the stage and the spotlight turned always upon him. Then
arrives the baby, and from having been the worshiped head of the house,
husband finds that he is nothing, with no one so poor as to do him
reverence.
Wife no longer cares what sort of a figure she cuts in his eyes, or
whether he admires her or not. She looks sloppy around the house
because the baby pulls at her clothes and musses her chiffons. When
husband wants to go out at night she refuses because she can’t leave
the baby, and if he drags her along anyway, she interrupts the most
thrilling part of a play to ask him if he thinks the nurse has
forgotten to give the baby his bottle.
There are no more chatty evenings at home, because she is off
worshiping before the baby’s shrine. She quits reading anything but
baby books, and her conversation gets to be about as stimulating as
sterilized milk. She is too busy with the baby to show her husband any
of the little attentions that men so love, or to see even that he has
the things he likes to eat.
There are thousands of homes which are run exclusively for the
children. There is never any food on the table except just the simple
things that children can eat. There is never any conversation except
about the children. The wife never manifests the slightest interest in
her husband, or shows him any affection. All of the tenderness, the
caresses, the sympathy and understanding is lavished on the children.
It is the children’s likes and dislikes and prejudices that are
remembered and catered to.
There are many wives who begrudge every cent that a husband spends on
himself because they want the money to throw away on the children. They
will nag their husbands into giving up smoking so that they can buy the
baby a real lace cap. There are wives who literally work their husbands
to death that their daughters may go off to finishing schools, and
their boys have the latest model sports automobile.
Now the average man loves his children, but he has not this crazy,
obsessing passion for them that their mother has. When the first
baby comes he is proud of it and fond of it, and he wants it to have
every proper care and attention, but he doesn’t want to spend hours
sitting by its crib, gloating over it and marveling at how naturally it
breathes. He wants to go about the ordinary affairs of life as he did
before the baby was born, and he wants his wife’s companionship.
But she will seldom go with him, and when she does, she is no fun
because she doesn’t enter into the spirit of anything. She has left
her whole interest in life behind in the nursery. Nor is she an
entertaining companion at home any more. And it gets on his nerves
being told to “sh-h-h-h-sh” every time he shuts the door, for fear he
will wake the baby.
He even discovers that his wife is relieved when he goes out without
her, and leaves her undisturbed to her infant adoration. And so the
rift is first made between them. Each starts on a life in which the
other has no part, and that takes them farther away from each other as
the years go by.
If the true co-respondent were ever named in many a divorce case, it
would be the first baby. There are always plenty of women a man can
find who will play with him while his wife is busy in the nursery; who
will listen to him and flatter him, while his wife is telling the baby
he is the most boofulest thing in the world. While mama is holding
the baby’s hand, some vamp is generally holding papa’s. It is a great
thing to be a good mother, but it is equally as great a thing to be a
good wife. And it is a bad thing to do either one at the expense of the
other. Often children are better off for a little wholesome neglect,
but a husband never is.
Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby your husband’s deadly
rival.
XII
LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS
These few lines are addressed to the thousands of girls who have
finished school and who are now standing, as the poet puts it, “where
the brook and river meet” wondering “where do we go from here?”
I want to urge you, girls, with all the earnestness of which I am
capable, to psychoanalyze yourselves and try to find out what talents
and aptitudes nature bestowed upon you, and then to go to some school
where you can develop your gift and fit yourself to be self-supporting.
I give this advice to the rich girl no less than to the poor girl, for
in these days of shifting fortunes we have the new poor as well as the
new rich, and no woman knows how soon she may be called upon to earn
her own bread and butter or starve. If she has been taught how to do
this, losing her money is merely an inconvenience to her; but if she
does not know how to earn a dollar, it is a tragedy.
No women in the world are so pitiful as those who have, as the saying
goes, “seen better days” and, with their money gone, are suddenly
flung out into the world to make their own living, with no trade, no
profession, no skill in any line, no knowledge of how to make a penny.
They can only eke out an existence by doing the most ill-paid work, or
else they become parasites, or are forced by hunger, and shabbiness,
and need into the sad sisterhood of the streets.
Don’t risk such a fate befalling you. Prepare yourself in time against
it. Have that within yourself which will not be affected by the fall
in stocks or the depreciation of real estate. Many things may rob you
of your fortune, but you cannot lose your trained brain and skilful
hand. They will be a resource that you can always fall back upon in any
emergency.
Of course I know, when I urge you girls to fit yourselves to learn some
gainful occupation by which you can support yourselves, that you smile
and say to yourselves that you do not expect to earn your own living
long. You are going to marry and follow woman’s oldest profession, that
of wife and mother. That is as may be. In the past the great majority
of women have been able to count, with a fair degree of safety, on
being able to marry, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that
the girl of to-day will get a husband.
There has been a most decided decline and falloff in matrimony and home
life, and it is foolish for girls to think that they have the same
chance of marrying that their mothers and grandmothers had. Now, for
the girl who is sitting around and waiting for some man to come along
and marry her, it is a catastrophe to be passed by. She becomes the
sour and disgruntled old maid, eating the bitter bread of dependence,
the fringe on some family that doesn’t want her. Or else she has to
take any sort of a poor stick of a man as a prop to lean upon.
Far different is it with the girl who has fitted herself for some
definite work and is competently doing it. She has a profession in
which she is vitally interested. She has an occupation which fills her
time. She makes enough money to indulge herself in the luxuries that
women love, and so marriage becomes to her merely an incident of life,
not the whole thing. If the right man comes along, well and good. If
not, also well and good. She has her pleasant, independent, interesting
life as a girl bachelor. The world to her is full of such a number of
things besides wedding rings.
Furthermore, girls, even if you do marry, you may still need to keep on
being a bread-winner instead of becoming a breadmaker. The high cost
of living has to be reckoned with, and not every man under present
economic conditions is able to support a family alone and unaided. In
the past the good wife helped her husband by doing the housework, and
turning, and mending, and pinching the pennies. In the future the good
wife will doubtless help her husband by keeping on with her well-paid
job and assisting in making the money to give her family the living
conditions, and her children the education that the man alone could not
afford to give them. So, except among the rich, marriage is going to
mean a retirement from business no more for women than it is for men.
Another reason why I urge you, girls, to learn some gainful occupation
and perfect yourself in it is because it will do more than any other
one thing to make you happy. It will keep you from being bored, and
boredom is at the root of all fretful discontent. People who are busy,
who have a definite object in view and are striving to attain it,
find the day all too short, are always content and cheerful. And talk
about thrills! You never really know one until you hold your first
pay envelope in your hand and it surges over you that the money in it
represents your own work that was good enough for somebody to pay for.
Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence
is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to
another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You
must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.
But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in
the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have
to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel
husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.
So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves
to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better
your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big
pay envelope.
It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the
way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of
any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of
superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or
profession.
We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to
sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature
intended you to be.
Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you
feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or
else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.
But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do
better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing
around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can
always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always
got a hundred in spelling at school.
There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase
goes, and that points the road for you to follow.
If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires
deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying
to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three
times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You
will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude.
You will always hate it and be bored by it.
The successful people are those who love their work so well that it
is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into
it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their
thoughts.
Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of
doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents
itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you
are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it
seems to you romantic or elegant.
Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is
as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that
those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine
lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as
there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well
paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are
fewer women experts than there are men.
There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become
presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every
community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers,
or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.
Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its
ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the
building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of
these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make
a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to
your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for
centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average
man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl
baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points
on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about
closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions
instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and
women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly.
And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they
portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they
were grotesque failures.
Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its
technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a
blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing
ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference
between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One
woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or
ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a
thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or
clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you
are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by
making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of
good work.
Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it.
Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over
with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as
something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is
going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will
give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the
right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes.
Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift
until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how
to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid.
Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart
and your back into it, and your success will be assured.
XIII
TRIAL DIVORCE
I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop
the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the
case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce
and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under
two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to
love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s
society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only
need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who
find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.
The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they
get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of
storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they
find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels
and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight
of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the
sacrifices that matrimony demands.
The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies
every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every
memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to
the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute
longer and rush off to the divorce courts.
But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view
each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at
a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating
the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his
ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a
good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough
sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his
nerves.
The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she
is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for
herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s
virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have
even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and
long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.
And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look
at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care
and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely
disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial
divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial
yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that
they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.
The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which
husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their
lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out
of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their
husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have
had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close
range.
Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she
sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who
is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she
begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she
thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of
the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same
reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged,
and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to
him.
Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their
husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the
same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the
breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they
would find that they preferred the old love to the new.
For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that
they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the
trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the
foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the
long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had
and are about to lose.
Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream
complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him
as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things
her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long
time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib
love-maker.
The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of
their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in
which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in
which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in
which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find
its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The
man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain
lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no
home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or
not.
The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to
live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her
and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her
own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the
consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go
back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.
So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial
divorce into them.
XIV
MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE
A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she
loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be
a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive;
in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is
no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few
husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In
almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being
kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.
This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than
the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be
loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.
Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she
dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his
life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly
happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning
to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog.
Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a
woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild
liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply
enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just
being loved.
It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake,
and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as
we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it
and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than
those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but
whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.
All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them
under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose
husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much
as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife
left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her
trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter
with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.
The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them
instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and
trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every
flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy,
too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.
There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony
should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than
she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a
woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and
therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased
with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.
A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and
amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does
not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his
business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him.
He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman
stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her
husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.
A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest
to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any
more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires
the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him
for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast
everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.
She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she
most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a
still hunt to find her real soul-mate.
To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She
must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary
years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work
harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and
cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a
comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this
worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That
gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a
dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave
driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands
over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess
making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.
The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is
the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and
soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success
than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that
concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the
great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her
activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak
or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement
in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his
key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”
The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never
disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut
out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got
the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor
sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated
husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry
a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a
stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down
and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with
domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no
trouble to please them.
But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she
wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and
she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold
cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and
while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would
like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that
the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.
A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very
much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t
get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes
through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who
think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or
long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who
burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who
married men they didn’t love.
The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own
angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up
stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband
better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even
these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of
having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night
because you know you can’t lose him.
Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for
a woman to love than to be loved.
XV
ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?
Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It
is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores
the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself
and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no
expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be
left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches
on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay
on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up
with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the
telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the
department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.
They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and
prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists
monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening
they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it
is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving
pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.
Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to
spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it
is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own
society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being
lonesome, and pity them accordingly.
It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves
which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom
they would never tire.
It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with
their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have
very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they
have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves,
on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with
it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next
door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a
new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when
she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their
conversational repertoire.
But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant
when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper
is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost
parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a
secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance
unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse.
Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else
except take the curse off loneliness.
You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and
mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils
from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with
bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances,
recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.
We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing
cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting
seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His
heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it
be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that
does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange
that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor
company for themselves.
You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she
nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining
she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had
done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself
that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things,
if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe,
that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that
she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead
of a demon of remorse.
It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection
of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving,
tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a
whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that
the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who
has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken
advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune
on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society
exhilarating.
When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are
enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we
loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have
held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they
are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty
and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from
ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a
pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom
is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!
XVI
KEEPING YOUNG
None of us wants to die. No matter how strong our religious faith, nor
how lustily we sing “Heaven is my home,” none of us is in a hurry to
go there. We prefer to stay in a world in which we are acquainted and
acclimated. Likewise, we all dread old age. It fills us with horror to
think of becoming bent and tottering old men and women, our vigor of
mind and body gone, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So from
time immemorial humanity has been on the still hunt for some magic that
will stay the devastating hand of time and enable it to hold on to the
youth it prizes so dearly. The ancients sailed the world over seeking
fabled islands and miraculous fountains of perpetual youth. We moderns
pin our faith to the surgeon’s knife and the druggist’s bottles, to
monkey glands, and face liftings, and paints, and powders, and hair
dyes.
All in vain. The black oxen of the years march over us, treading out
our youth and beauty, our strength and high spirits, and nothing that
we can do will stop them. So it seems a pity that we should waste so
much thought, so much struggle, and effort, and energy, and money in
essaying an impossible task. For do what we may, we cannot keep young,
and when we try to camouflage age as juvenility the only people in the
world that we fool are ourselves.
We can dye our hair the gold, or the black, or the jet of girlhood, but
we cannot put under it the fresh face of sixteen. We can have our skin
gored and tucked until all of our wrinkles are taken out, but there
still remain the tired, old eyes that have seen fifty or sixty years.
We can starve ourselves until we get the figures of flappers, but we
are not lithe and graceful. We are living skeletons. We can roll our
stockings and borrow our granddaughter’s clothes, but it doesn’t make
us look like debutantes. It makes us look like those afflicted with
senile dementia. The truth is, the more we fight age the harder it
fights back and the sooner it conquers us. None grow old so quickly as
those who work themselves into premature age trying to keep young.
Once I was standing behind a jaunty little figure perched on the
runningboard of a car. She wore the gayest and sportiest of sport
suits. She had the thin figure of a girl of fifteen. Her bobbed
henna-colored hair curled under the brim of a rakish little hat.
Presently she turned around and disclosed a face that was like a mask,
it was so plastered over with cosmetics. “Heavens! Did you ever see
such an old hag?” exclaimed a man near me.
Now, this woman was not more than fifty years old. She was in the prime
of life, at an age when many women are handsomer than they ever were
in their lives. No one would have thought of her as being old at all,
if she had been willing to appear her own honest age; if she had had
the pleasing plumpness that belonged to her time of life; if her soft,
gray hair had waved about her face, and if she had been appropriately
dressed. It was her effort to appear kiddish that called attention to
what an old goat she was.
If bobbing and dyeing their hair, and dieting themselves to emaciation,
and wearing knee-length skirts made elderly women look young and
girlish, they would not only be justified in doing so, it would be a
virtue to do it, for thereby they would make themselves easy on the
eyes. But just the reverse is true. Their affectation of youth only
calls attention to what a long distance they have traveled from youth.
Old mutton never seems so old, and tough, and stringy as when it is
dressed as spring lamb.
And the folly of trying to act young after you are old is just as great
as that of trying to look sixteen when you are sixty. Women have been
told so often they must keep their spirits young, they must never think
old thoughts, they must never speak of age, or admit to themselves they
are getting older, that they have come to believe that, simply by
forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain perpetual girlhood.
We all know women who begin every reminiscence by saying that they were
very young at the time it happened, and who give us to understand their
husbands were cradle snatchers, who married them when they were mere
infants. We know old women who are always teasing themselves about men,
and talking about their best beaus, and pretending to have flirtations
with boys young enough to be their grandsons, and repeating compliments
about their eyes or their fascinations they allege men paid them,
but that even an idiot would know that they made up themselves. How
ridiculous the poor souls make themselves! How infinitely older they
appear than the women who do not try to pose as vamps after they have
ceased to look the part, and who regard men just as they do women, as
interesting and agreeable human beings.
Perhaps, after all, we make too big a bugaboo of growing old. The
twilight has its charms no less than the dawn or high noon, and so the
last lap of the journey of life has its compensations and its joys if
we are willing to accept them.
Anyway, the only way we can escape old age is by dying young. But if we
welcome it as a friend, it deals kindlier with us than if we fight it
as an enemy.
XVII
GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN
A young woman writes me that she considers that she has a right to live
her own life in her own way and do exactly as she pleases. So she has
broken most of the Ten Commandments and snapped her fingers in the face
of Mrs. Grundy. And now that she finds that her reputation is being
torn to tatters, she thinks that she is being most unfairly treated.
“Oh, how I hate the whole tribe of kitty-cats!” she wails. “Oh, how
hard, and cruel, and unjust people are!” Then she asks, “Don’t you
think that gossip is the unpardonable sin?”
Not at all. Gossip is one of the most powerful influences in the world
for good. It is the invisible, omnipresent policeman that enforces law
and order. It is the scourge that keeps the trembling wretch in order
and makes the weak-kneed and the wobbly walk the straight and narrow
path.
We can stifle the voice of conscience, but we can’t silence the voice
of our neighbors. We can dope ourselves into believing that we have
a right to make our own code of conduct, but we can’t force the
community in which we live to take our point of view on the matter, or
to make any exceptions in our behalf to the standards that society has
set up for good behavior. And it is this fear of what “they’ll say”
that makes us curb our appetites and passions and keep up at least an
outward show of decency. For no matter how vain and egotistic we are;
no matter how self-complacent and self-satisfied we are; no matter
how independent we think we are, we are all cowards who grovel in the
dust before public opinion. It is the lifted eyebrow. It is the cold,
measured, appraising look that weighs us in the balance and finds us
wanting. It is the turn of a shoulder away from us and the little hush
that falls on a group as we approach that tells us that we have been
the subject of unfavorable discussion, which we dread more than we do
the wrath of God.
It is the knowledge that she will be gossiped about if she indulges
in any flirtations which keeps many a bored young married woman with
romantic yearnings from indulging in little affairs with good-looking
bachelors. She knows there might really be no harm in her having lunch
with Mr. A. or going to the theater with Captain C., but that she could
never explain it to the woman who lives across the street.
And the next time the Current Events Club meets she knows that she will
be the current event of burning interest discussed. Therefore she turns
down the alluring invitations and stays at home, and minds her p’s and
her q’s and her babies.
And it is the fear of gossip that makes many an indiscreet girl watch
her step and saves her from the stumble that would land her in the pit.
She is easy-going and good-natured, and warm-hearted and affectionate,
and she sees no harm in letting boys that she likes kiss her and
fondle her, but it makes the flesh creep on her bones to think of the
Amalgamated Scandal Mongers’ Union getting out their hammers and going
for her if she does. She knows well enough that the neighbors on either
side keep tab on what hour her beaux go home and what goes on as they
sit on the front porch or stoop of an evening, and she conducts herself
accordingly. There is no chaperon so efficient as Mrs. Grundy.
If we could only do as we pleased and get away with it without any
censorious comments from our fellow creatures, there would be many
more philandering husbands and wives than there are, many more girls
wandering down the primrose path, many more neglected children and
ill-kept houses, many more wife-beating husbands and virago wives. It
is the knowledge that, if they give way to their natural impulses, they
will be talked about, which gives many would-be sinners the strength to
resist the temptation to be as bad as they would like to be.
The people who think it is so wicked to be talked about are only
those who have something to hide, something that reflects on their
character. It is our bad deeds we don’t want discussed. We are tickled
to death to have our good ones broadcasted to the ends of the earth.
No man objects to having it told about that he is a model husband, a
good provider and a tender father. The thing he wants hushed up is that
he half starves his family in order to spend the money on a flapper. No
woman wants to put the soft pedal on the conversation when her friends
are telling what a wonderful wife and mother she is; but she doesn’t
know how women, who call themselves her friends, can be catty enough
to whisper behind their hands that she went out joy-riding with young
Snookums and didn’t get home until 4 in the morning, while the baby was
nearly dying with the croup.
Those who are down on gossip and feel that the world should cover up
their shortcomings with a blanket of silence are unreasonable. Why
should other people be more careful of your reputation than you are
yourself? If you do not care enough for your good name to protect
it, why demand that service of the general public? Foolish and vain
expectation! For the gossipers keep on their good work, and the only
way you can escape being talked about is to be so exemplary that you
are a dull subject for conversation.
XVIII
THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN
Why do we hold to the theory that work is a blessing to men, but a
curse to women? We know beyond all questioning that the necessity of
earning his bread by the sweat of his brow was the consolation prize
that Adam was handed along with his eviction papers when he was turned
out of Eden. We know that the only happy man is the busy man. We know
that only in constructive labor does a man find an interest that never
palls and a game in which there is a perpetual thrill. We know that
work is the greatest anodyne for sorrow and the best protection against
temptation. We know that, as Stevenson says, “if a man loves the labor
of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have
called him, and he is of all men most enviable.”
So manifold are the benefits men derive from work, so salutary are its
effects upon them, that we have a contempt for the idle, purposeless
man and feel that, no matter how much money he has, he has no right to
spend his life in loafing. We are eager to get our boys to work, so
that their restless young energy may find a legitimate outlet, instead
of being employed in devising new forms of dissipation. The young man
must have something to do, and if he isn’t bending his back in honest
farming he will be breaking his neck in sowing a wild-oats crop.
Our attitude, however, toward women and work is diametrically opposite.
We do not regard work as a good thing for women. On the contrary, we
consider it a misfortune for a woman to have to work. We have even
coined a phrase for it and speak of the woman who must earn her own
living as a “poor working woman.” Worse still, the woman who works
pities herself. The mother whose daughters go down to business every
morning bewails their fate and feels that destiny has dealt most
unkindly by them. The woman who must do her own housework, and look
after her own babies, and make her own clothes sheds barrels of tears
over her lot.
Men also accept this view of the situation that labor is a curse to
women, and work themselves to death in order that their wives and
daughters may live in parasitic ease, with servants to wait upon them
and have nothing to do but kill time. In fact, the consensus of opinion
seems to be that the ideal state for a woman is that in which she never
performs any useful labor, but merely sits on a silk cushion and feeds
upon strawberries, sugar and cream. All of this is a distorted view of
the situation. Women need to work just as much as men do. Idleness
has just as disastrous an effect upon the feminine character as it has
upon the male, and among women, as among men, the only happy, contented
ones are those who are so much engrossed in some useful labor that they
haven’t leisure in which to consider whether they are satisfied or not.
Mother “poor Marys” and “poor Sallys” her daughters who have to earn
their living, but nowhere else will you see healthier, happier girls
than those holding down good jobs in stores and offices. Nine times out
of ten the girl behind the counter is brighter, more alert, and finds
life a far more entertaining proposition than does her purposeless idle
sister before the counter.
Nor is the domestic woman who has to do her own housework entitled to
shed any tears of self-pity on our necks. There is no more reason why
a husky young woman shouldn’t do her share of the work of the domestic
partnership than there is why her husband should not do his. It is no
more of a hardship for her to have to work than it is for him, and many
a rich old woman who sits now with empty hands that ache for occupation
will tell you that her happiest days were the busy, crowded ones when
she got up at five o’clock to cook her husband’s breakfast before
he went to the factory and sat up until eleven o’clock washing and
patching his clothes so that he could make a decent appearance next day.
It is a significant fact that the women who fill sanitariums and
enrich nerve specialists are not the overworked, hard-driven wives and
mothers. They are the middle-aged and elderly women, who have nothing
to do but to canvass their systems for symptoms of every disease they
read about in the magazines. It takes leisure to develop invalidism.
Busy people keep well because they haven’t time to be sick.
Nearly every man’s ambition is to keep his wife in idleness, and he
thinks that he is being a good husband when he can boast that she
hasn’t a thing on earth to do but to amuse herself. It is pathetic
that the thing that so many good husbands strive for is their undoing.
For it is the idle women who are the peevish, fretful, discontented
wives. It is the idle women who run off with all sorts of fool fads
and fancies. It is the idle women who decide that their good, honest,
hard-working husbands are not their real soul-mates, and who get into
scandals with jazzhounds and elope with romantic-looking sheiks they
have picked up in hotel lobbies.
The idle woman is never a happy woman. Having nothing to do but to
think about herself, she is sure to prod around in her mind until
she finds a grievance. Having nothing to do, she is sure to get into
mischief. Having no interesting occupation, she begins to hunt for
thrills. And the net result is that she works harder trying to amuse
herself than she would at scrubbing floors, and the only reward is
that life is flat, stale and unpalatable in her mouth.
Let us hope that the time will soon come when we will have enough
intelligence to perceive that work is a woman’s salvation even as it is
a man’s, and when we will congratulate the woman with a job instead of
pitying her.
XIX
AN INDOOR SPORT
This is a sad world, mates, with too little sunshine in it, so far
be it from me to abridge, abate or curtail any innocent pleasure. But
it does seem to me that there are certain diversions that should be
indulged in only in the privacy of home. One of these is the family
spat. Apparently a large number of men and women get married for the
sole purpose of providing themselves with a sparring partner, with whom
they can put on the gloves at a moment’s notice with, or without, the
slightest provocation. Life has no dull moments for them, because they
are always saying something that draws blood, or framing a retort that
will cut to the quick, and the excitement of a battle to the death is
perpetually thrilling their nerves.
Without doubt, it is a merry and adventurous existence for the doughty
domestic warriors who enjoy that kind of thing! I would not be cruel
enough to deny them the cheery pastime of going to the mat over every
trivial difference of opinion. But I do contend that conjugal quarrels
are an indoor sport that should be pursued only when the participants
have sought the seclusion that the cabin grants, as they used to say
in “Pinafore,” and when all the shades have been pulled down and the
keyholes stuffed with cotton.
Possibly the lack of an audience might take off a little of the edge of
the bout for the battling husband and spouse; but, oh, how immeasurably
it would add to the comfort and happiness of those of us who are the
innocent bystanders and who are forced to look on, sick with horror,
at these encounters! In all good truth I know of no other situation so
miserable and so embarrassing as to be called upon to referee a fight
between a married couple. Their quarrel is, to begin with, a matter
with which we have no concern; one in which we do not desire to meddle;
one in which we ardently wish to take neither side. It makes us feel as
if we were cowards to keep silent while a man hurls deadly insults at
his wife, and we writhe in vicarious shame while a woman vituperates
her husband.
We have the sense of having assisted in an indecent orgy when a husband
and wife strip every rag of reserve away from their relationship and
fling open the doors of their skeleton closets, and rattle their bones
in public. Nor are we consoled by the knowledge that the people who
make public exhibitions of their tempers must enjoy doing so or else
they would not do it. Yet we all number among our friends, husbands
and wives, otherwise estimable and charming individuals, who always
stage their fights in the most conspicuous place they can find, and
who seem to prefer an audience to privacy. When you meet them for an
evening’s diversion they are having a preliminary set-to. Perhaps the
husband has come home late from the office, or has forgotten to mail
a letter, or possibly the wife has kept her husband waiting while she
did her hair over the second time. During the selection of the dinner
they get warmed up to the work and put in some punches with real steam
behind them. They clinch, and bite, and gouge over the selection of a
play, and they reach for each other’s vital spots and get in dirty jabs
at the supper dance that follows the play.
Doubtless the fighters are enjoying themselves, but a pleasant time is
not being had by all. The abashed onlookers know not what to do. They
do not know whether to rush in and make it a free-for-all fight or to
try to mediate between the warring couple, or whether to pretend to
have been suddenly stricken deaf, dumb and blind. And they wind up by
feeling outraged that they should have been placed in such a mortifying
position, and wishing heartily that husbands and wives would keep their
quarrels for home consumption, and not inflict them on their friends.
The same strictures apply to the woman who henpecks her husband. That
also is one of the quiet home joys that should be strictly confined
to the domestic circle. I raise no voice of protest against the woman
who has wit and strength and determination enough to oust her husband
out of his position as head of the house and assume it herself. It is
a matter between the husband and wife, and if he hasn’t enough spunk
to fight for his rights he deserves to lose them. But why cannot the
bossy women be content with exercising their tyranny quietly and
unobtrusively? Why do they insist upon rattling the chains by which
they lead their husbands until they call public attention to them?
Think of the women you know who always say “MY house.” “MY car.” “MY
children.” Who always walk ahead of their husbands and point out a
seat, and say, “John, sit there,” and who always tell John where to
get on and where to get off! And think how all the rest of us are
embarrassed for poor John! Believe me, dirty linen should be washed at
home, and family quarrels staged there. That is one of the main things
for which homes are designed.
XX
SHOULD WOMEN TELL?
I get a great many letters from women who write that there is a dark
stain on their past life. In the headstrong folly of youth they took
a step down the primrose path, then repented of their sin, and turned
their back upon it, and laid hold upon righteousness.
Sometimes nobody knows of the slip but the girl herself and the man who
was her partner in wrong-doing. Sometimes a woman who had mired her
skirts to the knees has washed them clean with her tears of remorse,
and had the courage to build anew her life in some place where her
early escapades are unknown.
Then love comes to these women. Good men offer them marriage and an
honorable place in society. And the question they ask is, shall they
tell these men the story of their life before they marry them, or bury
the secret in their heart, and leave the matter on the knees of the
gods?
This is a problem no human wisdom can solve, for, so far as the
woman is concerned, it is a case in which she will be damned if she
does, and damned if she doesn’t. Her chances of getting happiness—or
misery—through opening up her skeleton closet and exhibiting its
contents to the man who has asked her to be his wife are about even,
with the odds for happiness slightly in favor of keeping the lid
clamped down good and hard on her secret.
The question of right does not enter into the matter unless you
institute a prematrimonial confessional in which men shall bare their
souls as well as women. There is no more real reason why a woman should
tell a man every detail of her past than there is why he should tell
her of every time that he has strayed off of the straight and narrow
path.
It is true that a couple who knew the worst of each other would start
out their life together on a firm foundation of honest understanding,
but nobody can claim that it would make for their felicity, or increase
their affection for each other. On the contrary, they would have swept
away every illusion. They would have destroyed the faith of each in the
other, and they would have called into being an evil spirit, a ghost
out of the past, that they could not banish, and that would forever
stand between them.
Men have had the wisdom to perceive this. They realize that what a
woman doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her, but that the thing that she does
know she worries herself to death over, and so few men are foolish
enough to furnish a wife with a working diagram of their past lives
with which she can torture herself, and them. They draw a discreet
veil over episodes that are best forgotten, anyway, and deal only
in glittering generalities in referring to their gay bachelor days.
Moreover, women are sensible enough to let it go at that. No woman
wants her husband to tell her things that stab her every time she
thinks of them, and that eat like a canker into her memory.
It is only when the case is reversed, and when it is the woman who has
a blot upon her past, that she wonders if it is the right thing, the
honorable thing, to tell the man who wants to marry her about it. Of
course, the woman is bound in this by the double code of morals, which
makes one standard for the woman and another for the man, and that,
humorously enough, makes a husband feel that he has been exceedingly
ill-used if he discovers that his wife has a past that matches his own.
Therefore, because she is afraid that in future years her husband may
find out about her past life, or else driven by her conscience, or for
the sheer relief of sharing her burden with another, the woman nearly
always tells everything to the man before marriage. Sometimes it drives
him from her. Sometimes he loves her enough to marry her, in spite of
her revelations.
But, while he forgives, he never forgets. Always he is haunted by the
memories of what she has revealed. He never trusts her, never wholly
believes in her, and he has to be a bigger-souled man than most men
are if he does not reproach her with her past, and use it as a whip of
scorpions to scourge her with when he is angry with her.
Of course, when either a man’s or a woman’s past life has in it some
sinister curse that reaches out and lays a hand on the future of the
one he or she marries, he or she is bound in honor to tell the other
one about it. But when there is nothing of this kind, nothing but a
youthful folly, a mistake, a blunder in the dark, bitterly repented
of and lived down, it seems to me the part of wisdom for both men and
women to forego post-mortems, and to wash the slate clean and make a
fresh start.
What they have done does not matter so much as what they are going to
do. And it often happens that just because a man or woman has stumbled
in the past they walk the more carefully among the pitfalls of life,
and that out of the sorrows and repentance for their sins they have
brought a tenderness, a compassion, a forbearance and an understanding
that makes them better men and women than the vast majority of those
who have lived blameless lives.
Confession is always weakness. The brave soul keeps its own secrets,
and takes its own punishment in silence. It takes a strong man or woman
to keep from blabbing, but it pays never to tell anything that you do
not wish the world to know.
XXI
DOMESTIC BOREDOM
The thing that oftenest makes marriage a failure is its dulness.
The real specter on the hearth is that awful silence. It is because
husbands and wives have nothing interesting to say to each other that
they quarrel. It is no joke, it is a sad truth, that in any theater or
restaurant you can spot the married couples at a first glance. They are
the couples who are sitting up reading the program through from cover
to cover between the acts, or are apparently memorizing the menu while
the waiter brings their order. The alert, interesting, smiling people
who are gayly chatting together are the unwed, or those who are talking
to other people’s husbands and wives.
Let even a bore drop into a droopy, dejected family circle that has
been yawning itself to death and everybody brightens up and the stream
of conversation which had apparently dried up at its source begins to
flow again. Two may be company and three a crowd before marriage, but
generally after marriage two is gobs of silence and three a godsend.
Yet the majority of people marry for companionship. Before marriage
they could never get enough of each other’s society, and they esteemed
each other perfect spellbinders. How is it, then, that they get so fed
up on each other’s company that they sit up like mutes in the solitude
of their homes? Why is it that, apart from fault-finding and spats and
complaints about the servants and the tradesmen and bulletins about
the children, there is so little family conversation; practically none
that is interesting and cheerful and inspiring? You would think that
a husband and wife who have all interests in common could never talk
themselves out. But they do, and they come to the place where they take
refuge behind the evening paper or in solitaire to save themselves from
the pretense of even having to maintain the appearance of keeping up
social intercourse.
Wives lay the blame for this state of affairs on their husbands. They
say, heaven knows, that they would be glad enough to talk, but that
you can’t maintain a conversation with a person who always grunts by
way of reply, and who could give a clam on ice points on silence and
then beat it at the game. Men retort that they have exhausted their
conversational powers during business hours, and they desire to rest
their vocal cords at home. Nevertheless, it is observable that if
somebody interesting happens to call, or they go out to dinner, the
very man who was silent at home finds plenty to say.
Now there are several reasons why there is so little conversation in
the home. The first reason is because home talk is so often unpleasant.
Women, especially, are prone to flavor it with gloom. They like to
recite the litany of the day’s mischances. They spoil the flavor of a
dinner by telling how much it cost. They bring on a scene with a child
by telling of its naughtiness. They thrash over their old grievances
because they can’t have what richer women have.
All of this gets on the husband’s nerves, and he retorts by saying a
few pithy things about what a fool a man is to marry and burden himself
with a family and what a poor manager his wife is, and he gives a
few knocks to the dinner for good measure. After which conversation
naturally languishes.
Another reason that there is little conversation at home is because it
is dangerous. Experience teaches us that we have to watch our tongues
and delete our home talk if we want to save ourselves from endless
trouble.
A man hates to lie to his wife about what he does. He would enjoy
telling her all about the poker game he stayed downtown for last night,
and the funny things the boys said and did, but he does not do it
because well he knows that the price of such an indiscreet revelation
would be to have her nagging him about it forever and a day. A wife
would just love to tell her husband about her adventures in buying a
new hat, and how she fell for the twenty-five-dollar one instead of the
fifteen-dollar one she meant to buy. But she is well aware that she
would never hear the last of her extravagance if she did. So they both
keep silent.
There is little home conversation because nobody is interested, and
nobody pretends to be, in what you say. In the family circle nobody
listens. Nobody laughs at your jokes. Nobody sees the points of your
merry cracks. Try to tell a good story, and somebody is sure to remark
that they have heard it before, and that it is an ancient wheeze. If
you had discovered the North Pole and were relating your hairbreadth
adventures in reaching it by airplane, somebody would interrupt at the
most breathless moment to say that the iceman forgot to deliver the ice
yesterday.
Wives won’t listen even when their husbands try to tell them about
their hopes and plans and ambitions in their careers. And when a
woman tries to talk to her husband about the things that are of vital
interest to her he falls asleep and snores in her face.
And that is why conversation is a lost art in the family circle.
XXII
TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?
A young woman once said to me:
“I am, as you know, the private secretary of the head of a very big
business concern. I get a generous salary. My hours are easy. My
employer, who is an elderly man, is one of the finest men in the world,
and treats me with every courtesy, kindness and consideration. I feel
it a privilege to be in daily contact with such a brilliant mind as he
has. I love my work. I have what they call in men a business head. To
me there is no other romance so fascinating as the romance of commerce;
no game so absorbing as the business game. And it thrills me to the
finger tips to know that I have a part, even if it is a small one, in
this great adventure that sends men and ships to the uttermost parts of
the earth and that gambles for fortunes.
“It gratifies my vanity to know that I have worked up from the bottom
to my present fine position, and it pleases my ambition to know that I
can climb still higher, and that every year I will be more efficient
and more valuable to my employer. I enjoy the money I make, and the
luxuries it brings me, as only a woman can who comes of a poor family,
and whose girlhood has been barren of all the pretty things that girls
crave. I find a lot of solid satisfaction in watching my bank account
grow, knowing that, if I keep on with my job for a few years, I will
have put by enough to safeguard my old age.
“So far, so good. If I were going to remain perpetually on the sunny
side of forty, I would ask no life better than that of the successful
business woman. But the dread hour will strike for me, as it does for
all other women, and I am wondering if, when it does, I will not find
myself a lonely old woman, and wish that I had married and had children.
“I am thirty now, and I have got to decide the question in the next
year or two. Shall I give up my mahogany desk for a gas range? Shall
I forfeit my fat pay envelope for a job where I shall have to toil
ten times as hard for only my board and clothes? Shall I give up the
occupation for which I spent years in preparing myself, for which I
have talent and which is a joy for me to perform, for domestic service
which I loathe, for which I have no aptitude and in which I am utterly
unskilled?
“When I see my sister shabby, bedraggled, overworked, with her crying
babies and grouchy husband I feel like clinging to my good, soft, easy
office position with both hands. Then rises that specter of the future
in my pathway, and I wonder if in staying single I will miss the best
that life has to give to a woman, and if I will regret it if I refuse
to follow the traditional career of my sex.
“Of course, I know that there are women who try to have their cake,
and eat it, too; who grab matrimony with one hand, and hold on to
their jobs with the other, but my observation is that they always
fall between the stools. They are failures both as business women and
as wives and mothers, for to succeed in anything you have to give
everything that is in you to it.
“No woman is of much use in an office when nine-tenths of her brain and
all of her interest are back home in a cradle and she is worrying over
whether a hired nurse is giving the baby its milk. Nor can any woman
who comes back home at night, with a worn-out body and jangled nerves,
be anybody’s ideal of a wife and mother.
“So as far as I am concerned I have to decide the question which I am
going to be, a business woman or a domestic woman, before I take the
fatal step, and for the life of me I can’t make up my mind which to do.
To marry or not to marry, that is the problem that I am acquiring gray
hairs and wrinkles debating.
“Of course, if a fairy prince should come along and say, ‘Come and be
my queen, and ride beside me in my limousine and tour the world with me
on my yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and put on my
glass slippers, and step out with him.
“But it is only in novels that millionaires espouse poor working girls.
The men who come a-courting me are just ordinary young chaps on small
salaries, whose wives will have to do their own cooking, and wear
hand-me-downs.
“Nor would there be any difficulty in settling the question if I had an
overwhelming passion for some man. Then I would cry, ‘All for love and
my job well lost!’ and a two-by-four flat would look better to me than
to be president of the greatest corporation in the world. But I am not
really in love. I have merely an affection for a certain chap that I
might possibly cultivate into a warmer emotion if I decided that it was
better, after all, to marry.
“But it is cruel, isn’t it, that a woman has to choose between marriage
and her career? When a man marries he merely annexes a home and wife
and children to the pleasures and interests of his work, but a woman
has to sacrifice one or the other. And I don’t know which one to
choose.”
“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt to regret it,” I replied
consolingly.
XXIII
WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT
A man told me the other day that he had not married until he was
forty-five years old because he was determined not to marry any woman
who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that long to find
one.
A wise man! A very Solomon among men! May his tribe increase! It is a
million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny
bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men go to
marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has melting black
eyes, or soulful blue eyes, without ever once observing whether the
said eyes look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic,
bilious view of it. Which is one of the reasons that domestic life is
no merry jest to the average husband.
A sense of humor is desirable in a man, but it is absolutely essential
for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to be an agreeable life
partner, because a woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging
things, at which she must either laugh or cry, and if she can’t laugh
them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces.
It is the neurotic, haggard women, who can’t see a joke even after it
is diagrammed for them, who fill the insane asylums and the sanitariums
and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off,
and whose laughter is set on a hair trigger, get to be fair, fat and
forty, and you couldn’t pry their husbands away from them with a
crowbar. It is the lack of a sense of humor that causes women to make
tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles.
Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves sick
over the mistakes of a green maid, and it never occurs to them that the
very blunders that they are shedding tears over are screamingly funny
contretemps that they pay out money to see imitated in a sketch on the
vaudeville stage.
Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of
salt, nor the waste-paper basket to be put on the mantel as a parlor
ornament as a perpetual thing, but the mistress who can get a laugh
instead of a sick headache out of the mistakes of her Norah or Dinah,
fresh from Ireland or the cotton fields, saves her own face and that of
the maid whom she later trains into being a good servant.
Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can take the curse off of even
bad cooking, for there is not one of us who would not rather sit
down to a boiled dinner with a jolly woman, full of good stories and
anecdotes, than to attend a banquet where the hostess is gloomy and
peevish and whiny, and who frets with her children and spats with her
husband.
Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends
altogether on whether she has a sense of humor or not. If she can
see her husband as one of the most mirth-provoking, side-splitting,
uproarious human jokes that nature ever perpetrated she will be happy,
and he will bless heaven on his knees for having given him the paragon
of wives. But if she sees him as an Awful Problem, or a subject for
reformation, neither one of them will ever know a happy hour, and the
marriage will either end in a divorce court or a long endurance contest.
The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands
seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another
woman, or play a little poker, or fail to come home at the appointed
hour, and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary, or fail
in some little attention they consider their due. The women who keep
their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who
laugh with their husband over their little faults and peculiarities.
They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a pretty face; they
have a dozen funny stories to tell about how they helped their husbands
out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling ill-used and assuming the pose
of a domestic martyr when their husbands forget their birthdays, they
go out and buy themselves a particularly nice present, which they pay
for without a murmur because they know that a wife with a sense of
humor is worth anything she costs.
A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a
wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear
her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging
because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of
direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth
is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles
and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences,
as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are
not fatal if they are carefully watched.
She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and
jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and
not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured
ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about
the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do
not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many
silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble
worrying over what is going to become of the race.
In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion
that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the
thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that
gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has
this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.
XXIV
GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS
It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a
selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as
human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source
whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice.
But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in
addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long
for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights
that even their children should respect.
Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that
its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that
Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it
cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings
into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it
likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby
to give it fine clothes.
As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their
parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want.
They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar
they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that
Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn
on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously
enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the
great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their
parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’
rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have
sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will
stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”
Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the
loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support
them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while
Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the
piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never
crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are
old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon
their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever
think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they
grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny
themselves while they were raising and educating their children.
Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their
parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn
over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a
bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children
down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer,
she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves
them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners
and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes
nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.
It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing
they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother
did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what
broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little
children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this
burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used
to seeing her doing everything for them.
It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a
little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing
up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her
substitute on raising another one.
Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their
parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a
family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to
prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not
her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or
three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying
their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the
matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.
They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money
that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances
to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she
comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father
works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and
educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them.
Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as
that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this,
and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they
have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be
fewer parasitic sons and daughters.
Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people
would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and
many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t
perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and
her children’s support.
XXV
ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?
Are you a good father to your daughter, Mr. Man? You smile derisively
at my question. A good father to your little girl? You’ll tell the
world you are! Why, she is just the very core of your heart, and there
hasn’t been a blessed thing that she has wanted since the day she was
born that you haven’t given her. Why, you have almost broken your neck
trying to get the moon for her when she cried for it. Pretty dresses,
fashionable schools, good times, her own car, far more luxuries than
you could afford her, you have lavished upon her without stint. You
have kept her wrapped in cotton wool, and she has never known there was
such a thing as work or responsibility or self-denial in the world. You
may have failed in many other directions in doing your full duty, but
you can pat yourself on the back and thank God that you have been a
good father!
Well, let me tell you that if all you have done for your daughter is
just to pamper her and spoil her and make her weak and selfish and
self-centered, you have not been a good father. You have been the
worst sort of father. You have never looked upon your daughter as
anything but a pretty doll to dress up and play with, and dolls cannot
take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble fight of life. Sooner
or later they are apt to get broken.
Let me tell you what I consider a good father. A good father is a man
who doesn’t look upon his daughter as a toy or a piece of bric-a-brac,
but as a human being who has been born with the heavy handicap of the
feminine sex upon her. That means that she will always be less strong
than a boy, less capable of taking care of herself, in far more danger.
Fewer opportunities will be open to her, and many more perils beset
her than would a boy. Therefore, she needs more protection. She needs
to be better trained to deal with the world. So the good father sees
to it that his girl gets the very best education that she will take.
Not the flubdub, fluffy ruffles sort, but a solid, practical education
that develops whatever gray matter she has got in her pretty little
head, that teaches her to think and reason and that gives her a solid
foundation on which to rear her house of life.
Then the good father has his daughter taught some profession or trade
whereby she can earn a living, and he has her follow this occupation
for at least a year. He does this for many reasons. He does it because
he knows how easily money is lost, and he wants to know that his
daughter has in herself the skill and ability to make her own living
if she is ever thrown on her own resources. He does it because he knows
the knowledge that she can stand on her own feet and earn her own bread
and butter and cake, gives a girl a poise nothing else in the world
can give. He does it because the discipline of a business office,
the experience in handling money and an insight into the troubles
and problems of men are the best preparation any girl can have for
matrimony.
A good father chums with his daughter. He begins being confidential
with her in her cradle, and this makes it natural that when she grows
up she should discuss with him the boys who come to see her, and that
father should be able to form her tastes and assiduously guide her in
her choice of a husband. Girls know nothing about men. It is impossible
that they should, but there is nothing about any young chap that father
can’t find out, and if he knew that this youth had a hectic past, or
that one drank, or the other one was a trifling ne’er-do-well, it would
be the simplest thing possible to prevent many an unhappy marriage
by making daughter see a suitor through the sophisticated eyes of a
worldly-wise man, instead of the romantic ones of a young girl.
A good father tries to protect his daughter after he is dead. So, when
he makes his will he leaves her whatever money he has to bequeath her
tied up good and tight in a trust company so that she cannot touch
anything but the interest. He knows that every woman who has any
money is the foredoomed prey of get-rich-quick sharks and all of her
parasitic relatives. He has seen too many women sell their gilt-edge
bonds and invest the proceeds in wildcat stock that promised to pay
40 per cent and never paid a penny. He has seen too many women lend
their money without security to Deacon Jones, because he prayed so
beautifully, or to Uncle John, because they didn’t have the nerve to
say “No” to a member of the family.
Above all, a good father leaves his daughter’s money in trust for her,
not only to save her money but to save her from friction with her
husband. He has seen many a man graft his wife’s fortune deliberately,
and he has seen many more good men, who were poor business men, bring
their wives to poverty. And he knows that it takes more backbone than
the average woman possesses to hold on to her money when the man
she loves is continually asking her for it. So father saves her the
necessity of any arguments on the subject. Are you doing these things
for your daughter, Mr. Man? Are you a good father?
XXVI
THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN
The most overdressed and overindulged children are those whose parents
were poor in their youth. The most undisciplined and uncontrolled
children are those whose parents were reared in strict and stern
households. When you see a little girl playing around in a befrilled
lace and embroidered dress and silk stockings, you do not need to be
told that at her age her mother wore gingham and went barefooted. When
you see a young boy splitting the road open in an imported car you
know that when his father was a lad he trudged on foot to the factory
with his dinner pail on his arm. When you see ill-mannered young
people who smoke and drink and carouse and recognize no law but their
own pleasure; who run roughshod over the rights of others; who have
no respect for age, and who either patronize their parents or treat
them with contempt, you know that they are the offspring of fathers
and mothers who were given few privileges when they were young and who
were coerced by determined and strong-handed parents into walking the
straight and narrow path.
Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “I don’t want my
children to be denied things as I was in my childhood”; “I don’t want
my children to have to work as I did when I was a child”; “I don’t want
my children to be suppressed and tyrannized over as I was when I was
young.”
Indeed, so common is this feeling that sometimes it seems that the
present generation is being brought up by the rule of contraries, and
that the only fixed idea that many parents have is to rear their sons
and daughters exactly opposite from the way they were reared; to give
them everything they didn’t have and to let them do everything they
were not permitted to do.
There is something very pathetic in this. It speaks so eloquently of
the ungratified cravings of childhood, of the weariness of little hands
that never knew any playtime; of the thwarted desires for pleasure
at the time of life when one is mad for amusement, and it is easy to
understand why parents whose own childhood was stinted and dull should
want to lap their children in luxury and give them all the fun they
missed. But in trying to save their children the hardships they have
gone through, they are also cutting their sons and daughters off from
the experiences that make such men and women as they are themselves—the
kind of men and women who rise from poverty to fortune and from
obscurity to fame. For it is not in the lap of ease that successes
are made. It takes struggle and self-denial and discipline to form
character.
That is why we have the proverb that it is three generations from shirt
sleeves to shirt sleeves. The poor man by energy and industry piles
up a fortune, but because he has had to work and save in his youth he
teaches his children to be idlers and wasters and spenders, and they
run through their fortune and their children must go to work again at
the bottom of the wheel. Probably the children of the self-made man
have naturally just as much ability as he has, but they nearly always
amount to nothing, because their foolish father has denied them all
the advantages he had when he was young and he has enervated them with
indulgences.
People who have been brought up in puritanic homes almost invariably
let their children run wild. They put no restraints upon them. They
demand nothing of them. They resent the lack of liberty they had in
their youth, and so they give their children license. They do not seem
to realize that the system at which they rail made good citizens,
instead of the hoodlums which they are turning out. They do not reflect
that they owe their health and strength to clean living; that because
they were made to do things they formed habits of industry; that
because they were made to do hard things just because it was a duty to
do them they developed the grit which keeps men and women from being
quitters; that because they were taught obedience and self-control they
became captains of their own souls and masters of their fate, instead
of being the playthings of their passions and emotions.
They must know, if they stop to think at all, how much better fitted
they were to meet life, how much more secure they were of happiness
than are their children, who have never been taught to do anything
they do not want to do, or to deny themselves the gratification of any
appetite or desire.
For life doesn’t change. The world does not alter and no matter how
much we would like to soft-pad existence for our children and stand
between them and every hardship and sorrow, we cannot do it. At the
last, in one way or another, they must come to grips with fate, and
when they do the weak and dissolute will perish. The spendthrifts will
come to want. The self-seekers will have their hearts broken.
Of course, it is a great temptation for parents to lavish upon their
children everything that money will buy, and it is much easier to give
strong-willed youngsters their heads and let them go their own gait
than it is to hold them in check, but that way destruction lies for
the child. And this is something that parents, who are denying their
children the struggle of life that made them what they are, might well
reflect upon.
XXVII
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW
Undoubtedly there is no other thing over which so many tears are shed
and which is such a potent source of discord and misery as in-laws.
Innumerable young women have the happiness of their youth wrecked by
their quarrels with their mothers-in-law. Innumerable old women have
their last days made bitter to them by the knowledge that they are
unwelcome guests in their sons’ houses and that their daughters-in-law
hate them. Innumerable men are made miserable by being torn between
the two women they love, who fight over them like dogs over a bone.
Discussing this subject the other day, a woman who is a mother-in-law
said:
“Like everything else, the mother-in-law question is a fifty-fifty
proposition, and when they don’t get along together both are to blame.
Certainly it isn’t an easy thing for a woman who has run her own
house and been at the head of everything to take a back seat in her
daughter-in-law’s home. And it isn’t easy to forget that your children
are your children and to keep hands off in their affairs and treat
them with the formality you would strangers.
“On the other hand, most daughters-in-law meet their mothers-in-law
with a chip on their shoulders and are always hunting for trouble. They
seem to feel that when a man marries he should forget the mother who
bore him and wipe out the memory of all the years of close association
that there has been between them. They are even jealous of the
slightest attention and consideration that their husbands show their
mothers.
“They seem to forget that if it wasn’t for these much-resented
mothers-in-law they wouldn’t have any husbands at all, and that the
better husbands they have the more they owe to their mothers-in-law.
“For if a man is tender, and kind, and generous, and considerate to
his wife, it is because his mother has taught him to be chivalrous to
women. She has trained him to be a good husband just as she has trained
him to be a good citizen, and he honors and respects his wife because
he so greatly honors and respects his mother.
“You never saw a bad son who was a good husband. You never hear of a
man who abused and cursed his mother, and regarded her as only a slave
to wait upon him, who didn’t treat his wife the same way. And so we
mothers who raise up clean, straight sons, who enter into marriage with
high ideals and a determination to cherish their wives and make them
happy, have done the girls who get them such a service as they could
not repay if they were down on their knees before us the balance of
their days.
“But if any daughter-in-law has ever lifted her voice in thanks to her
mother-in-law for teaching her son to be unselfish, or to be generous
with money, or to pay her the little attentions that women love, I have
never heard of it.
“And there is another queer thing about daughters-in-law. They seem to
think that marriage should obliterate a man’s past and break all the
ties of his life.
“He and his mother may have been the closest of companions; he may have
asked her advice on every subject and talked over all of his plans with
her, but woe be unto all concerned if he tries that after he takes a
wife.
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the wife grows green-eyed and
considers it rank treachery to her, and for the sake of peace mother
and son have to forego the little talks that were such a joy to them
both or else do this stealthily and hold a stolen rendezvous.
“Yet it does look as if any woman who wasn’t a moron would have sense
enough to see that any man who could forget his mother and all he owed
to her would be such a disloyal creature that he would forget his wife
when some younger and fairer woman came along.
“Of course, the chief charge that our daughters-in-law have against us
is that we are always meddling in their affairs. Perhaps we do, but
aren’t our children’s affairs our affairs too? Hasn’t the mother who
has raised her son to manhood and who has made him strong and capable
of earning a fine salary a right to say something when she sees his
hard-earned money being wasted, his home neglected and his health
ruined by bad cooking?
“If a mother saw her own daughter treating her husband that way, she
would rebuke her and show her where she was making a fatal mistake, and
the daughter would not resent it. Why can’t a daughter-in-law take the
same advice and profit by it, instead of flying at the throat of the
mother-in-law and considering herself a martyr to mother-in-lawism?
“Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. I know daughters-in-law
who are real daughters to their husbands’ mothers. I even know
daughters-in-law who have borne with angelic patience cranky women
who could not even get along with their own daughters. And I know
mothers-in-law whose presence is like a benediction in a house and
others who are firebrands wherever they go. So perhaps there is no
way to settle the question so long as we are all human and not female
saints. But God pity the mother who is obliged to live with her
children, no matter how kind they may be! She is always the fifth
wheel, and feels it. Perhaps those savages who kill off all the old
people haven’t such a bad plan of disposing of the question, after
all.”
XXVIII
WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US
A woman wants to know why it is that we find it harder to get along
with our families than we do with other people, and why our own
blood-and-kin rile us more than anybody else on earth. Probably the
main reason why we find it so difficult to live in peace and harmony
with those who are really near and dear to us is because we are too
much alike. We have inherited the same traits of character, and when
these come in collision there is a resounding crash, and the noise of
wrecked tempers and exploding wrath.
Father, an iron-willed, tyrannical gentleman, who has ruled his little
world like a despot, cannot get along with John, who is of the same
fiber, and equally determined to have his own way and do as he pleases.
Father and John may have a very sincere affection for each other and
admire each other’s good qualities, but they can never be together an
hour without getting into a fight over something.
Mother is a born manager, one of the ladies who honestly believe,
with the famous Frenchman, that she could have saved the Almighty
from making some mortifying mistakes if she had been consulted at the
creation. Mary is mother’s own daughter in her perfect belief that she
knows exactly how to run the universe. What wonder, then, that they
clash over every gown and hat that is bought; over every man that comes
to see Mary; over everywhere that Mary goes?
Sometimes the reason that we can’t get along with our own people
is because we are so entirely different from them. Often and often
children are changelings, and those of our own flesh have no tie of
spiritual kinship with us. The father who is a hard-headed, practical
business man has nothing in common with the son who is a quivering
bunch of nerves and sensibilities; who is a dreamer of dreams, and who
counts wealth in terms of beauty, instead of dollars. Mother, who was
a beauty and a belle in her day, with scores of lovers sighing at her
feet, has looked forward to reliving her triumphs in her daughter. And
when daughter grows up to be a big, sturdy young person who wants to
go into business and who loathes society, what wonder that they get on
each other’s nerves?
When you hear parents speak bitterly of what a disappointment children
are, and how ungrateful, it merely means that their children are
different from them. John insists on being a doctor or a lawyer instead
of going into the hardware business father has been building up for
him for twenty years. Mary wants to marry a poor young man, instead of
the nice, settled, rich widower mother has picked out for her. Other
people find John brilliant and talented. Father calls him a fool to his
face because he won’t do father’s way. Other women are sympathetic with
Mary’s romance, and her willingness to sacrifice riches for love. It
infuriates mother to see her throwing an establishment and pearls and a
limousine away, for a sentiment.
Often the reason we cannot get along with our own families is because
they are like a mirror in which we see our own faults in all their
hideousness. Father’s lack of ambition that has kept him from making
anything of his life; mother’s shiftlessness and wastefulness that have
kept the family poor; brother’s brutal temper; sister’s sharp tongue
that cuts like a two-edge sword—these irritate us, and we find them
harder to forgive than we would such defects in other people because we
know that we are, ourselves, prone to just these weaknesses.
Besides these fundamental reasons why it is hard to get along with our
relatives, there are a thousand minor causes of discord. One of the
principal ones is the lack of politeness in the family circle, for most
people feel that good manners are like good clothes, and should be worn
only for the benefit of company. It is an amazing but true thing that
practically the only people who ever say mean, insulting, wounding
things to us are those of our own household.
Strangers listen to us with apparent interest, and laugh at our
jokes. Our friends compliment our new frocks and cars. If our casual
acquaintances do not like our taste or respect our judgment, they keep
silent about it. It is our families who stab our vanity to the quick
by yawning in our faces, and asking us if we are going to tell that
old story over again; who bluntly inform us that our new hat is ten
years too young for us, and that there is nothing so ridiculous as old
women trying to be flappers; who criticize the way we are raising our
children, and tell us the home truths we would rather die than hear.
Still another reason why it is hard to get along with our families is
because it is generally held that the mere fact that you love people
gives you a perfect right to nag them. We speak of family ties as
binding. Binding is right, for in the average home no one can rise up
or sit down, eat or fast, go or come, without having to give an account
of why he or she did it or didn’t do it, and being advised to do it
some other way.
It is for these, and a thousand other reasons, that we find it
difficult to get along with our families, and fly to those who do not
feel that they have a right to boss, correct, advise or otherwise
interfere with us in the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.
XXIX
OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM
You have been in factory towns where more or less benevolent
corporations have built rows upon rows of houses, each one as like
its neighbor as peas in a pod. But one house would have dirty,
grimy, unwashed windows, with old newspapers or rags stuffed in a
broken window pane. The yard would be filled with old cans and ashes
and refuse, and the place would look like a shack, unfit for human
habitation.
The house next door would have bright and shining windows, with clean,
freshly starched muslin curtains and a gay red geranium in a pot
showing between them. Flowers would be blooming in the yard, and a
vine trained over the doorway, and the place would be a home, bright,
cheerful and attractive. Yet the two houses were exactly alike. The
only difference was in what the people in them made of them.
One cook can take a cheap cut of meat and a handful of vegetables and
make of them a ragout, over which an epicure would smack his lips.
Another cook will take the same meat and vegetables and make of them
a watery stew, with neither flavor nor nutriment to it. It is the same
material, but the difference is in the cooks.
That is the way it is all through life. There are a few fortunate
individuals who seem to be the darlings of the gods, and with whom Lady
Luck walks hand in hand. And there are also a few miserable ones who
appear to have been born double-crossed by fate. But the great majority
of us get a pretty even deal. We have the same family relationships.
We go to the same schools. We have the same chance to work, and the
balance is up to us. We are happy or miserable, successful or failures,
rich or poor, according to what we make out of our lives. We marry,
millions of us. And set up homes. One out of every seven of the
marriages ends in divorce. More than three-fourths of the homes are
wrecked, not because there is anything especially wrong, not because
either husband or wife is an outbreaking criminal, but because they are
too ignorant or too selfish to make their marriage a success.
All husbands and wives are cut off the same bolt of humanity. No man is
perfect. No woman is an angel. No domestic machine runs along without a
jar or a hitch. Every marriage calls for sacrifices, for patience, for
forgiveness, endurance, and you get out of it just what you put into
it—heaven or hell.
You go to homes that simply irradiate peace and love and good
cheer, where there is a happy and contented man, and a smiling and
blissful woman: where there are fine children growing up in the right
atmosphere. And you go to another home that is a place of torment,
where a surly man snarls and snaps, and a disgruntled woman whines and
complains, and unruly, uncontrolled children fight like the Kilkenny
cats.
Yet both of these families started out with the same equipment. Both
couples were in love when they were married. Both had about the same
amount of money. Both were called upon to make the same sacrifices.
Both had the same chances at happiness. Yet one made a success of
marriage, and the other failed.
We talk about opportunity, and when we fail we lay the blame on luck.
We say we never had a chance. But the truth is that we are our own
luck, that we make our own opportunities.
Did you ever think that every day in the year there are thousands of
green country boys going into every big city, seeking their fortunes,
and thousands of city boys leaving those same cities because they think
that everything is overcrowded and overdone, and that they have no
opportunity there? And many of those country boys will find the chance
the city boy overlooked, and pick up the fortune he passed by.
The world is full of failures, croaking that there is no money in
farming or the mercantile business, and warning young men that they
will starve if they become lawyers, or doctors, or actors, or writers,
or artists. Yet there are rich farmers with bursting granaries.
Everywhere millionaire business men. There are world-famous lawyers and
doctors and matinée idols and men who write best sellers.
And the successes are side by side with the failures, working in the
same environment, under the same conditions, and the only difference
is the difference in the men themselves. It is the difference in the
energy, the grit, the determination, the stick-at-iveness, the heart
and soul and brains that one man put into his work and the other
didn’t. Whether we are happy or not depends upon ourselves, for in
reality we all have pretty much the same raw material with which to
work.
Sickness, suffering, the death of those we love, disappointment,
come to us all. The poorest woman alive and the millionairess bear
their children in the same agony, and weep the same tears over little
coffins. Money does not buy love, tenderness, nor peace of mind, and
just as many hearts ache under silver brocade as under cotton.
But we can hold our souls serene if we will. We can keep from fretting.
We can resolutely extract the sweet instead of the bitter out of life.
We can dwell on our blessings instead of our miseries, and we can
acquire a philosophy that will enable us to laugh instead of weep over
the misadventures that befall us.
For our lives are what we make them. It is all up to us.
XXX
HUSBAND LOSERS
Three divorced women were talking together the other day and one of
them said:
“When we wives lose our husbands we always accuse some other woman of
having stolen them from us; and we cry out that our husbands are cruel
ingrates, who have taken the best years of our lives and then thrown
us aside like broken toys when we were no longer young and beautiful.
And we pose as blameless martyrs who are the pitiful victims of man’s
perfidy.
“Of course, it saves our faces to be able to lay all the blame for our
wrecked homes on others, and it soothes our hurt vanity to be wept over
as a poor, innocent, deserted wife. But in the still watches of the
night, when we have it out with our own souls, there are mighty few of
us who can shrive our consciences and know that we are blameless.
“Most of us know in our heart of hearts that if our husband’s love
died, we did our part in administering the lethal dose. We may have
done it through ignorance, through carelessness, through blundering
stupidity; we may have even done it with the best intentions in the
world and with the firm conviction that we were forcing down their
throats a remedy that would cure them of all the little ailments and
weakness of character from which they suffered. But the point is, we
did it. We were accessory to the crime, and we could have prevented it
if we had so wished.
“Now, as you know, my husband forsook me for his secretary. I called
her a thief who had used her position to rob me of a husband and my
little children of their father, and I looked upon him with bitterness
and contempt, as a poor weakling who let an adventuress make him forget
his honor as a man and his duty to his wife and children. I called
Heaven to witness that I was innocent and that I had been a good, true,
virtuous woman, who had always done her duty to her family. It took me
a long time to see that, if my husband grew weary of me, I had made
him tired by my incessant nagging and fault finding; that if he ceased
to love me, it was because I was no longer lovable, and that the other
woman had not really stolen him from me. I had simply handed him over
to her on a silver salver.
“You see, I was one of the wives who did not realize that it is easy
enough to get a husband, but the work comes in in keeping one. I
thought that after a woman was married she could let herself go, and
so I never bothered to keep myself dolled up at home, or to try to
make myself pleasant and agreeable. I went in negligee, both as to
clothes and manners. Any old rag was good enough to wear at home. Any
disagreeable topic was a suitable breakfast-table discussion, and I
felt perfectly free to quarrel with my husband, and criticize him, and
ridicule all of his little faults and idiosyncrasies.
“I forgot that he went from a sloppy wife to an office where a trim,
perfectly groomed woman, younger and better looking than I, waited
for him. I forgot that he went from my nagging and fault finding to a
girl who was paid to agree with him and whose job depended largely on
her flattering him and telling him how wonderful and great he was. It
wouldn’t have been human for him not to constitute a daily comparison
between us, and it was inevitable that when he did, that I should lose
out. If I had kept my doors locked and my burglar alarms in working
order no one could have looted my home. And so I am just as responsible
for the wreck of it as are those who broke it up.”
“My husband was a gay, pleasure-loving man,” said the second divorcee.
“He always wanted to be going somewhere. He loved to be in the thick
of crowds. He adored dancing, and restaurants, and the bright lights.
He loved fine clothes, and always wanted me to look like a fashion
plate. Now, I am a serious-minded woman and was brought up to take a
serious view of things, and I felt it my duty to cure my husband of
his frivolity by leading him up to what I considered the higher life.
I began by trying to wean him away from his old friends, on whom I
turned such a cold shoulder that they soon ceased coming to the house.
I lectured him about his extravagance and the way he threw away money,
and finally got possession of the family purse and doled out dimes to
him. I wouldn’t go out with him of an evening, and I rarely let him go
without a scene. At first he submitted, but he looked bored and sulky,
and then he broke out of jail, which was all his home had come to be to
him, and that was the beginning of the end.
“For, of course, when I wouldn’t play with him he found some other
woman who would, and who wouldn’t wet-blanket every occasion by her
moral strictures or spoil every meal at a restaurant by looking at the
pay check. If I had been willing to flatter him, and jolly him, and
dance with him, and let him spend his money on me, he would never have
left me. But I wouldn’t do it, and my austerity got on his nerves. He
wanted a playmate instead of a censor, and so I feel that I am just as
much to blame as he was.”
“I lost my husband through ambition,” said the third divorcee. “He
was an artist of great talent, and I was mad for him to win fame and
money, so I never let him rest. I prodded him on all the time. I was
forever a goad in his side, and so I became to him a sort of incarnate
conscience, a perpetual reminder of all the unpleasant duties of
life. He was temperamental, a child of impulse, and I became his
task-mistress, a slave driver to him. Finally he got to the place
where he could stand it no more, and he eloped with a young girl as
irresponsible as he was. She will never push him on to success as I
would have done, but she lets him follow every whim and she will hold
him, as I could have done if I had had intelligence enough to see that
you can’t make a work horse out of Pegasus.”
“How much happiness we might save if only our wisdom did not come too
late,” sighed the first woman.
XXXI
MARTHA OR MARY?
Clever Mary—who, take it from me, knows her way about—was talking about
her friend, Martha, the other day.
“Of course, Martha is the Perfect Housewife,” she said, “but she
is a mighty poor wife. Without doubt, she is a great and glorious
housekeeper and a cook and baker and cleaner. Never have I seen a
rumple in her curtains. Her bedspreads are like the driven snow. And
you could eat off her floors. Her house is so immaculate that her
husband must feel a perfect stranger in it, and like a bull in a china
shop.
“But her days are so taken up with work that she has time for nothing
else—not a minute to read or to play, or to be a companion to her
husband. In fact, she is so worn out by the time night comes that she
is too tired to do anything but go to bed.
“Her husband loves to read, but if he sits up late, the light annoys
her so much that she can’t sleep, so she says. So she nags him until
he gives it up in disgust. She, herself, never reads anything except
the advertisements of the department stores in the papers, and the
thrilling accounts of vacuum cleaners and patent breakfast foods in the
backs of the magazines. And when her husband tries to talk to her about
the things he is interested in—books, sports, his business—he had just
as well try to ring any other dumbbell.
“Now, I do all my own housework, and I must be a fairly capable
housewife, for my mother-in-law has put her O.K. on me, and that
settles that. But there isn’t a spot in my house where we can’t park
ourselves at any time. My library table is filled with books and
magazines, and if husband drops ashes and scatters the Sunday papers
all over the place, I let him, and gently and painlessly remove them
after he has passed on.
“I don’t really know anything about sports. I wouldn’t recognize a
home run if I met it on the street, but when hubby wants to talk about
baseball I assume an intelligent expression. And I am never too tired
to play with my husband. I grab my hat the minute he suggests the
movies. I can get ready to go anywhere in an hour. I just adjust my
complexion—Martha considers that a real vice—and we are off.
“Martha can’t understand why my husband very rarely goes away from
home of an evening and almost never without me—while hers beats it
to the corner drug store as soon as he has eaten his superexcellent
dinner. And I just can’t make her see that it is because she puts her
house before him. She worships cleanliness and order, and sacrifices
everything to them. The first thing Martha knows, she is going to lose
her husband, and she will go around wailing and weeping and telling how
hard she worked and what a good housekeeper she was. She never will
know that she literally drove him away from her with a broom handle.
“I told Martha the other day that if she would spend less time
polishing her mahogany and more time polishing her finger nails and
rubbing up her mind, it would be better for her. But she just smiled
that superior smile that a model housekeeper always bestows on the
woman whom she suspects of having dust on the back pantry shelf, and
made a dive for a basement sale of somebody’s patent cleaning fluid.”
Mary is right. Cleanliness and order are two of the domestic virtues
that may easily be converted into vices. We all know spick and span
houses that are no more homes than a shiny tin box would be. Nobody
would dare disarrange a sofa cushion in one of them. Nobody would have
the courage to move a chair from its appointed place. To track a bit of
mud on one of the shining floors would be a high crime and misdemeanor.
To leave anything hanging around would be a sacrilege unspeakable.
Husband and children flee these temples of order and cleanliness as
they would a torture chamber. And they live in dread and fear of the
woman who has worked herself cross and irritable attaining her ideal of
housewifery. Most of the real homes are places not too bright and good
for human nature’s daily use. They are places where you can take your
ease; places run on a flexible schedule and only reasonably clean and
orderly.
Doubtless, the old lady who laid down the maxim, “Feed the brute,” as
a rule for retaining a husband’s affections said a wise mouthful to
women. But more is to be added, for man does not live by bread alone,
and it is just as important to feed his soul as his stomach. Every
woman who fails to give her husband good, nourishing food fails as a
wife, but she fails even more if she does not give him companionship.
For, after all, there is a good restaurant on every corner where a man
can satisfy his physical hunger, but none but his wife can minister to
his spiritual hunger. Foolish is the woman who doesn’t realize this and
who spends her time keeping her house clean instead of making it a home.
But that is the trouble with matrimony. A woman can’t be either a
Martha or a Mary. To be a good wife she has got to be both.
XXXII
THE T. B. M. AT HOME
A man wants to know if I don’t think his wife is very wrong and foolish
to be hurt and offended because he is often irritable and cross at
home. He says that she knows that he adores her, and that he is a model
of all the standardized domestic virtues, but that he works all day
under a terrific strain, and by the time night comes his nerves are
worn to a frazzle. He thinks that his wife should appreciate this, and
that instead of further rasping them with argumentation, she should
apply a soothing emolument to them.
I agree with the gentleman that it is always the part of prudence for
a wife to give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, instead of
retorting with a snappy comeback when her husband makes a nasty crack
at her. It certainly doesn’t add to the peace and harmony of a home
for a wife to be ready to jump into her fighting clothes every time
her husband makes a pass at her. Nothing comes of family rows but
bitterness, and anger, and disillusion. Nor does any love long survive
them.
I also agree with the gentleman that any woman who has cut her wisdom
teeth on matrimony should be able to assay her husband’s temper
and tell how much of it is due to raw nerves and how much to pure
cussedness, and so know when to spread the salve and when to hand him a
solar-plexus blow. Furthermore, I opine that a wife who starts anything
with her husband at evening until after he is fed and rested, and has
had his smoke and his paper unmolested, deserves to be put in the Home
for the Incurably Feeble-Minded for the balance of her natural life
or else bound over by the courts to keep the peace. For she is either
lacking in brains or just loves a fight for the fight’s sake.
It is the greatest possible pity that women haven’t more sense of humor
than they have, for if they did they would be able to laugh at many
things their husbands do over which they shed scalding tears. It would
enable them to see how really funny it is for a big man to get into a
babyish tantrum over nothing and how much easier it is to kid him out
of it than it is to make a scene over it. Unhappily, however, few women
have a funny bone, and fewer still can see the joke when it is on them,
and so husbands and wives meet temper with temper and irritability with
irritability, and the domestic war goes merrily on.
The mistake that most wives make is in taking their husbands too
seriously. They have heard so much about the mighty masculine
intellect that they think their husbands are profound, thoughtful human
beings who mean every word they say and whose every act is part of a
deeply considered plan of life. Whereas the truth is that men babble
just as meaninglessly as women do, and are the creatures of impulse.
Also, women are under the misapprehension that they have a monopoly on
nerves, and that hysterics are the sole prerogative of the feminine sex.
These beliefs make women attach a significance to the things that men
say and do to which they are not entitled; and it makes them “get their
husbands wrong” and break their hearts over crimes that the poor,
blundering men do not even know that they are committing.
In consequence whereof the wife’s feelings are in a constant state of
laceration, and she meets each hard knock with a still harder one, or
else goes off and salts her wounds down in the brine of her tears.
Now, no one will argue that a human cyclone is a pleasant companion
to live with, nor would any sane woman pick out a man who is giving
a life-like imitation of the Day of Wrath with whom to spend her
evenings. But, all the same, women make themselves unnecessarily
miserable by taking their husbands’ humors too seriously.
The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul are not prompted by
malice toward her. They are the reaction of nerves that have been
frazzled to the breaking point by the worries of the day at the office.
The frozen silence which the wife finds it so hard to endure is just
sheer exhaustion of mind and body, and the woman who can just take her
husband’s moods this way can not only save herself many a tearfest, but
can make her husband eat out of her hand by feeding him and laughing at
him and jollying him along.
Certainly, the woman who is married to a nervous, overworked man might
well do a little mental balancing of accounts and check off a lot of
temper, and impatience, and unreason, and fault finding against the
finery he gives her, and the success he has achieved, of which she is
so proud and which he has literally bought with his life’s blood. She
might well forgive his faults and deal leniently with them, since they
are the direct result of his struggle to lap her in luxury.
She is, believe me, a discerning and a tender wife who answers her
husband’s irascible speeches with a pat on the head and a “there,
there, it’s all right,” as she would a sick and fretful child, instead
of going to the mat with him.
So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now for the husband’s.
Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and grouchiness, and
general disagreeableness. No man has a right to come home at night
and dump down on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper, and
irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.
Because a woman has the misfortune to be a man’s wife is no reason he
should insult her and say to her things that he would not say to any
other woman who had an able-bodied brother, or that he would not dream
of saying to any woman who had $10 to spend across his counter, or who
was his client, or his patient.
If a man can control his temper and his tongue in dealing with the
outside world, he can control it still at home. If he can be polite and
courteous and flattering to other women, he can make the same gracious
speeches to his wife, instead of growling like a bear when she asks
him a simple question. And if he has any sense of honor, he will be
the more careful of what he says to his wife than he is to the others,
because his attitude means nothing to them, but his wife’s whole
happiness is dependent on the way he treats her.
Nor does the fact that he overworks excuse a man’s irritability at
home. Nine wives out of ten would rather have a little more amiability
from their husbands and less money, if they had to choose between the
two. The beloved husbands and wives are not those who work themselves
into a state of nervous irritability for their families. They are those
who keep themselves calm, and good natured, and pleasant to live with.
To expect other people to overlook our temper and forgive the cross
and cruel speeches that we flash out at them without provocation is
demanding too much of human nature.
XXXIII
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM
A woman asks this question: “Is it wise for a wife who loves her
husband devotedly to let him see how dear he is to her? Does the
knowledge that her heart is his for keeps make him undervalue it? Does
she best keep his interest in her alive by keeping him on the anxious
seat? After all, a husband is still a man, and we know that before
marriage the more difficult a woman is to win the more a man chases
her; and the more a woman throws herself at a man’s head the more
adroitly he dodges her. So the question is, Does this same state of
affairs continue after marriage? Do men want their wives to blow hot
and cold, as they do their sweethearts, or do they desire them to be a
good, steady, reliable fire on the hearthstone?”
A man’s attitude toward love undergoes a complete change on his wedding
day. During his courtship, the thing that has been of more importance
to him than anything else in the world has been the state of mind
of his lady love. It has been a wonderful, sentimental adventure
following all her moods and tenses, and plumbing the depths of her
emotions. It has roused his sporting blood for her to be coy and
difficult. Taking her away from his rivals was a game of fascinating
intrigue, and he thrilled with the sense of being a conquering hero
when she finally surrendered to him.
But marriage is another pair of sleeves. It is a different
story altogether. A man marries to end romance, not to have it
to-be-continued-in-our-next serial that will run on the balance of his
life. He wants to be done with doubts, and fears, and heart burnings,
and speculation about the woman he loves, so that he will be free to
give his undivided attention to his business.
Therefore the tactics that won a woman a husband do not serve to hold
him, and the wife who tries to pique her husband’s interest in her by
her flirtations with other men is more apt to land in the divorce court
than to strengthen her position in the domestic love nest. For men do
not wish to be kept guessing about their wives. They want to be sure
of them. The man who is married to a woman who plays around with other
men and who keeps him on the ragged edge of nervous prostration with
jealousies and suspicions does not think that he has drawn a capital
prize in the matrimonial lottery. On the contrary, he thinks that he
has been gold-bricked, and he is not crazy over his bargain.
No woman need be afraid to let her husband know how much she loves him,
because her love makes the strongest claim she can possibly have upon
him. Many a man who has made an unsuitable marriage with a woman with
whom he had no real companionship; many a man who has outgrown the
woman he married in his youth, is kept faithful to her by the knowledge
of her devotion to him. It takes a brute to hurt the one who worships
you, or to leave the one whose whole life is bound up in you.
Nor is there any charm of mind or person that appeals to a man so
much as just the certainty of a wife’s love and the sure knowledge
that if all the world turned against him, there is one who would
still be standing shoulder to shoulder with him; some one who would
go down to the gates of death with him, or wait outside of the prison
gates for him; some one whom neither disease nor poverty nor disgrace
would alienate from him. The coquettish woman who thinks to keep her
husband’s affection for her at fever heat by keeping him uncertain of
her has no such hold upon her man as has the wife whose husband’s heart
doth safely trust in her, sure that whatever else fails him in life,
her love will never fail.
A wife need not be afraid to show her husband her love, because men
are just as heart hungry as women are. They crave affection and
appreciation just as much as women do, and they long just as much as
women do to be petted and fussed over.
No complaint is more common from women than that their husbands stop
all love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jars the very
marrow of their bones. They say that the men to whom they are married
never seem to think that they long to be told that they are still loved
and admired, and that they have made good as wives. They yearn for a
kiss that is warm with passion, instead of a duty peck on the cheek
that has about as much flavor to it as a cold batter cake.
But, apparently, it never occurs to these wives who are starving for
some sign of real living affection themselves that their husbands are
also on the bread line, mutely begging for a stray crumb of love. They
do not realize that a great big, husky, successful man could want to
be chucked under the chin, and babied, and told that he was the most
booful thing on earth, and that his wifeikins got down on her knees and
thanked God every night because she was lucky enough to get him, and
that every day, in every way, she loved him better and better.
Yet there isn’t a man in the world that wouldn’t worship a wife who
handed him that line of chatter, and who wouldn’t walk mighty straight
and reverently before one who opened the doors of her heart and let
him see that he was enshrined therein. No. No wife need be afraid of
letting her husband know how much she worships him. For it is love that
makes the world go round, and that greases the wheels of matrimony.
XXXIV
QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE
Did you ever think how many queer things there are about marriage? To
begin with, isn’t it queer that we permit boys and girls to get married
at an age at which they are not permitted to make any other binding
contract? The law appoints guardians to look after the property of
minors, and prevent them from squandering it, or being cheated out of
it by sharpers, but there is no legal safeguard to save foolish girls
and boys from throwing away their life’s happiness on an ill-advised
marriage.
At a time of life when we consider a lad’s judgment too immature for
him to make a thousand-dollar investment, we assume that he is worldly
wise enough to pick out a life mate. At an age when we think a girl’s
taste too unformed and too hectic to select her own clothes, we let her
choose a husband.
Isn’t the casual attitude we take toward matrimony queer?
Marriage is the most important act in our lives, the thing that not
only makes or mars us, but that affects thousands of people yet to be.
Compared with marriage, being born is a mere episode in our careers,
and dying a trivial incident. Yet there is no other thing that we do to
which we give as little intelligent, serious thought.
If we were going into a business partnership to invest our entire
fortune, we would think a long time before we committed ourselves. We
would consider the proposition from every angle. We would look into its
weak spots and try to form an honest opinion of its chances of success.
And we would investigate the past record of the man we were proposing
to go into business with, and find out everything about him.
We would ascertain what sort of a life he had led, how honest and
honorable he was, how much he was to be trusted, and what sort of a
disposition he had, whether he was pleasant to get along with or not.
Yet the worst harm that our business partner could do us would be
to cheat us out of our money. He couldn’t break our hearts and make
our lives miserable. If we didn’t like him, we could dissolve the
partnership without any trouble or disgrace.
But nine times out of ten those who enter into the marriage contract,
which is the most binding contract of all, do not take the trouble to
make even the slightest investigation about the one with whom he or she
is making a life partnership. Every day we read of people who discover
that they are married to bigamists. Every day some husband stumbles
into his wife’s skeleton closet, and finds that the woman whom he
believed pure and innocent has a dark and sordid past. Every day some
agonized mother looks at her deformed or idiotic babe, and sees that
the sins of the father have been visited on her child.
The man was handsome, and he danced well, and he had a dandy sport
model car. The girl was pretty, and she had a cute trick of looking
up through her lashes, or a baby stare, so they got married without
bothering to find out a single thing about the kind of life each
had led before they met. They wouldn’t have bought a house without
having had an expert see that its title was clear and that there
was no mortgage on it, but they will marry without finding out what
sort of encumbrances are on the lives of their husbands and wives.
They wouldn’t buy a horse or a dog without looking into its pedigree
and finding out what sort of stock it comes from, and whether it is
sound in wind and limb, but they will pass diseased blood on to their
children with no thought of the sort of heredity with which they are
cursing them.
Isn’t it queer that men and women fail to consider the dispositions of
those they marry? Yet that is the thing that people have to live with,
and it is what makes marriage a success or a failure. It isn’t high
and noble principles; it isn’t truth and honor and honesty that makes
or mars a man’s or woman’s happiness in marriage. It is the temper of
their husbands or wives. A man may be a model of all the virtues, and
yet if he is stingy and grouchy and gloomy, his wife will be miserable
with him. A woman may be as chaste as Cæsar’s wife, yet if she nags,
her husband will rue the day he led her to the altar.
All men and women know this, yet a girl will go along and marry a man
who even before marriage gets the sulks over every little thing that
goes wrong, with whom she has to always walk on eggs to avoid riling
him, and who carries his small change in a purse with a snap lock. And
a man will marry a thin, nervous, irritable girl, who is always getting
peeved about everything, and who never can say a thing and let it rest.
And they both wonder after marriage why marriage is a failure, and why
they can’t get along together.
Isn’t it queer that people don’t pick out the kind of husbands and
wives that they want, and that will suit them?
A man who is a student will marry a silly little girl who hasn’t two
ideas in her head to rub together. In the days of courtship it was
inevitable that he should take the measure of her brainlessness and
find out that when he talked to her of books that he spoke of an
unexplored world to her, and that when he discussed the things in which
he was interested she yawned in his face. Nor could he help perceiving
that her chatter was the chatter of a magpie, and the things in which
she delighted were things that bored him stiff.
His common sense shrieked to him that marriage between two people who
had not one single idea, nor an ideal, nor a thought, nor a desire, in
common was bound to be a failure. But the man, wise and sophisticated
in other things, but clinging blindly to his superstitious belief in
the potency of the marriage ceremony, refused to heed the warning.
Somehow, he was confident that just getting married would change a
silly, ignorant girl into an intellectual woman who would be a fit
companion to him; miraculously render one who had never even read a
sixth best-seller familiar with the world’s best literature, and make
her prefer to discuss world topics to gossip about the people next door.
We wonder why poor men marry fashion-plates; why men who love to eat,
marry girls who loathe the kitchen; why quiet, domestic men marry
girls who live to dance and go to cabarets. They are all poor, blind
heathen, trusting in the marriage ceremony to make an extravagant girl
economical, a frivolous girl serious, an undomestic girl domestic.
Isn’t it queer? Not only do we superstitiously believe in the power of
the marriage ceremony to change other people, but we actually think it
will change ourselves.
The philanderer believes that he will never cast a roaming eye at
another woman as soon as he is married. The loafer believes that he
will be filled full of pep and energy by the mere fact of having a
wife to work for. The stingy, selfish man is confident that he will
enjoy spending money on his family. The girl who has never thought of
anything but dolling herself up and having a good time believes that
as soon as she is married she won’t care any more for fine clothes or
going about, and that she will be perfectly satisfied to stay at home
and save her husband’s money and cook him good things to eat.
But alas! the miracle of the marriage ceremony no more works on us than
it does on those we marry. Long before the honeymoon has waned we make
the discovery that somehow the mysterious something that was to change
us didn’t take, and that we are the same old individuals, with the
same old tastes and desires that we always had. Then to so many comes
the cold, bitter knowledge that they are tied for life to one who is
utterly uncongenial, to one who bores them and gets upon their nerves.
And, queerest of all is it that no matter how unhappily people have
been married, when death or divorce sets them free, they nearly all
want to try matrimony over again!
XXXV
HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM
A woman writes me that she has been married to a man for sixteen years,
yet she has never got acquainted with him. She says he is good and
kind, but indifferent to her. He never finds fault with her and never
praises her. He spends his evenings at home by his own fireside, but a
mummy would be just about as conversational. All of this has got the
woman guessing, and she can’t figure out whether her husband still
cares for her or not, or whether he regards his marriage as a success
or a failure.
Good gracious, sister, don’t imagine for an instant that you have
anything unique in the way of a husband! All men are full of curious
peculiarities, and no woman ever gets acquainted with one, no matter
whether she has been married to him for sixteen years or sixty. For, as
an old colored friend of mine says: “Husbands is the most undiscovered
nation of people there is.”
No woman ever understands, for instance, why it is that a man who was
an ardent and impetuous wooer turns into a husband with about as much
sentiment and pep to him as a cold buckwheat cake, as soon as the
marriage ceremony is said over him. Nor can she form any idea of why
the man who was willing to risk his life to get her takes so little
interest in her after he has got her. She cannot doubt that he loved
her, because he gave great and indisputable proof of that by assuming
her support for life. Nor can she see any reason for his change of
attitude. She still carries the same line of bait with which she caught
him. She still has the same eyes that he likened to violets drenched
in dew, but he doesn’t notice them. She still has the same white hands
that he used to hold by the hour, but if she wants anybody to hold them
now she has to hunt up some man to whom she is not married. No woman
can ever understand why a man doesn’t put forth the same effort to make
his home a going concern as he does to make his business or profession
a success.
If every man tried to sell himself to his wife as he does to his
employer, or a big customer, or a valuable client, there would be no
disgruntled, dissatisfied married women in the world. If every man
studied his wife’s peculiarities of disposition; if he played on her
weaknesses as deftly and handled her as tactfully as he does a merchant
who is about to place a big order, or a rich patient, every wife in the
land would be eating out of her husband’s hand. If every man paid his
wife a fair wage for her services, as he does his stenographers and
clerks, it would take the heaviest curse off matrimony for millions of
wives.
But, altho to have a contented wife and a peaceful and happy home means
more to a man than to make a million dollars, not one man in a hundred
ever gives any real serious thought or makes any honest effort to make
his marriage a success. He leaves the most important thing in his life
to chance, and he wins out or loses, according to whether fortune is
with him or not. Women never can understand why their husbands refuse
to handle them diplomatically, when it would be money in their pockets
to use the velvet glove instead of the strong-arm method.
Every man knows that he can jolly his wife into doing anything, and
doing without anything. He knows that if he hands her a few cheap
compliments about what a wonderful manager she is and how she helps
him, she will squeeze every nickel. Every man knows that if he tells
his wife how beautiful and lovely she looks in her last year’s dress,
she wouldn’t trade it off for the latest Paris importation. Every man
knows that he can kiss his wife’s eyes shut until she will be blind as
a bat, and that he has only to give her a warm smack on the lips to
make her dumb as an oyster.
And every wife knows that her husband knows these things about her,
because she has furnished him with a complete diagram about how to work
her. And she never knows whether to be mad at him or disgusted with
him, because he would rather fight with her and pay for it in having to
eat bad meals, and having his money wasted and buy her new frocks and
limousines and pearls, than to take the trouble to flatter her a little
and treat her the way she is begging to be treated.
Most of all, women never can understand why their husbands are so
stingy with words, which surely are among the cheapest commodities on
earth. Above everything else, every wife yearns for words of love, for
words of praise from her husband. Just to have her husband pet her, to
have him say to her that she grows dearer and dearer to him every day,
and that he thanks God for giving her to him, pays any woman for all
the sacrifice, all the work, all the suffering that marriage brings
her. It makes her heart sing with joy, and the lack of it fills her
life with tears of despair.
Every man knows this. Every man knows that he can make his wife happy
with just a few words, and yet he withholds them. Even the men who
really love their wives and appreciate all that their wives do for them
refuse to give the starving souls the words that would be the bread
of life to them. No. No wife ever gets acquainted with her husband.
Husbands always keep us guessing to the end of the chapter. Perhaps
that is why we all want one of these living conundrums.
XXXVI
THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
Among my acquaintances is a woman who has a pretty little flapper
daughter. The girl is a good little girl, as playful and innocent as
a kitten. But she bobs her hair, and paints her face, and rouges her
lips, and likes to jazz, and joy-ride, and have a good time just as
thousands of other girls of her age and class are doing. All this
greatly outrages the mother, who tells her daughter that, in her day,
decent girls didn’t paint their faces, or shimmy, and that they stayed
at home evenings and read good books, instead of running around with
japanned-haired boys. And then she winds up her preachment by accusing
her daughter of doing things which she does not do, and prophesying
that she will come to a bad end. Of course, it is mother love and
mother anxiety that makes this woman keep continually before the girl’s
eyes the fate of those who follow the road of pleasure. It never enters
her head that she may be precipitating on her child the catastrophe she
dreads, but that is precisely what she is doing.
She is making the girl feel that she is sophisticated and
worldly-wise—one of the wild, wild women. She is giving the flavor of
forbidden fruit to what would otherwise be harmless little amusements.
She is making the girl reckless, because she is making her believe that
she is under suspicion and is being talked about. Worst of all, she is
firmly implanting in the girl’s mind the idea that she is expected to
go wrong.
And if anything in the world will put the skids under a girl, it is
for her own mother to be continually impressing upon her that she is a
wrong ’un.
When you observe the dealings of parents with their children the thing
at which you wonder most is that fathers and mothers never seem to
realize the power of suggestion. Yet it is one of the most potent
forces in the world, and one that can be directed with almost uncanny
results to the molding and shaping of the characters of the young.
It is hardly too much to say that as the parents think, so are the
children. It is the fixed idea the parents stamp indelibly on the
plastic childish mind which determines the fate in life of the man or
woman.
You can, for instance, take a delicate child and literally “think” it
into health or sickness. If the mother keeps the child forever reminded
it can’t do what other children do because of its poor heart, it can’t
eat this or that because of its bad digestion, and that it mustn’t
be crossed because it is so nervous,—that child will grow up into a
neurotic invalid. But if the mother impresses on it the thought that
it is getting well, and is going to be strong and healthy, unless there
is something radically organically wrong, it will overcome the weakness
with which it was seemingly threatened.
All of us have seen people actually bring upon themselves diseases they
believed they had inherited. They had had it impressed on them from
their infancy that they were bound to die of consumption because all
the Smiths had tuberculosis. Or, that they were doomed to perish with
cancer, because cancer was in the Jones family. Or, to have rheumatism
because the Simkins were all rheumatic, and they died of what they
believed to be inherited diseases that science has proved not to be
inheritable.
It is tragic to think how many parents have killed the children they
loved by putting the death thought upon them, and by making them
believe that they were doomed, and that there was no use in their
trying to be strong and well. It is still more tragic to think of the
millions of people who are failures in the world because their fathers
and mothers have sapped their courage, and slain their initiative by
implanting in their minds the conviction that they were dolts and had
not the ability to succeed.
Once establish the inferiority complex in a child’s mind, and it is
done for. It accepts the belief that it has no ability to do things,
and it attempts nothing. It makes no struggle to rise. It slumps
into the humble position its parents have assigned it. This is why
perpetual fault-finding with a child intensifies its faults. To nag
Johnny continually about his awkwardness, makes him still more awkward.
To be forever calling attention to Tom’s shyness, makes him shrink
more and more out of sight. To fret at Bob’s dulness, makes him feel
that there is no hope for a boy who isn’t quick and alert. Many men
never have the courage to demand their just deserts and take the place
to which they are entitled in business and society because they were
made self-conscious in their childhood. They had it so impressed on
their minds that they were blundering louts, and stupid fools, that
they shrank within themselves, and never had the nerve to push their
fortunes.
And just as you can make a child a failure by holding the thought of
its inferiority before it, you can do much to make it a success by
holding the thought of achievement before it. We unconsciously strive
to be what the people about us expect of us. If Jimmie knows that he
has a reputation for beautiful manners, he will act as a gentleman. If
Tom knows you expect him to make a mark at school or in business, he
will try to make good. If Mary knows you do not think it possible for
her to be anything but sweet and innocent, she is not likely to tarnish
your ideal.
The power of suggestion is so far reaching in its influence that
fathers and mothers should be careful how they use it, and avoid
implanting a weak thought, an evil thought, a thought of failure in
their children’s minds as they would avoid giving them poison.
XXXVII
WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY
As a sex women are highly altruistic. There is scarcely a movement in
the world for the uplift of humanity or for ameliorating the sorrows of
the poor and helpless that does not owe its existence to women. It is
women who support the orphan asylums, the homes for old men and women,
the reformatories, the houses for the blind, the places of refuge where
the man just out of prison can go and gather himself together before
starting out on a better life. It is women who nurse in hospitals, and
who carry on mainly the work of the Red Cross and the fight against
the great White Plague. Joan of Arc is the great feminine heroine.
The women that other women envy most are not the great beauties and
sirens of history, or the famous actors and writers, but the Florence
Nightingales and Frances Willards who have been able to do some great
service to their fellow creatures. And deep down in her secret heart,
if every woman was granted her one great wish, it would be to be able
to help her day and generation to make others happier, and to perform
some miracle that would make life easier for all who come after her.
Well, little as she realizes it, that power is possessed by every woman
who has children. In her hands lies the remedy for the greatest sorrow
that tears at the hearts of men and women. She can wipe away half of
the tears of the world. She has the magic that can change innumerable
lives from misery to joy. For the greatest trouble in the world is
domestic trouble. The bitterest disappointment is a marriage that is
a failure. There is no place of torment so hard to endure as a home
of bickering and strife. No enemy can stab you to the heart as does a
cold, selfish, unkind husband or wife.
It lies within the power of mothers to put an end to all this misery,
to stop divorce and the breaking up of homes, and the orphaning of
helpless little children. It is in their power to provide every man and
woman with a good husband and wife, to make every home a prosperous and
peaceful one, and to save other mothers from the agony of seeing their
children mistreated by the men and women to whom they are married.
There is no more appalling thought than that every woman could raise
her children up to be good husbands and wives, and that she does not do
it. On the contrary, nine times out of ten she brings up her sons and
daughters to be exactly the kind of husbands and wives from whom she
prays God on her knees to deliver her own precious darlings.
Most likely the woman is herself the victim of another woman’s cruelty.
Her own marriage has been wretched because her husband’s mother never
taught him to treat women with any courtesy, or consideration, or
chivalry. He was never brought up to consider a woman’s feelings, or
even to extend to her common justice. As a result, his wife has had to
walk on eggs to keep from rousing a demoniacal temper. She has had to
wait on him hand and foot. She has had to wheedle every penny out of
him, and never since her wedding day has her husband made one move to
entertain or amuse her, or done anything to make her happy.
It would seem that a woman who had been through the arid desert of such
a marriage would save some other poor girl from such a fate by raising
up her son to be a good husband. You would think that she would teach
him what a terrible crime it is to take a woman’s life into his hands
and break it; that she would teach him to be gentle and tender to his
wife; that she would impress upon him that a woman earns her share of
the family income, and that it should be given to her outright instead
of being doled out as alms.
You would think that she would ground him, from his infancy up, in the
knowledge of all the little things that make a marriage a failure or
a success to a woman—the little attentions, the little treats, the
word of praise, the compliment on a new dress or hat, the little things
that make a woman’s heart sing with joy, and that makes marriage worth
while to her. The great majority of women, however, never even so much
as think of training their sons to be good husbands. Nor do they train
their daughters to be good wives. Very few mothers would be willing to
see their sons marry the kind of girls their daughters are.
Mother has raised her daughters up to be selfish and spoiled and lazy
and extravagant, and she is ready to foist them without mercy on any
poor young fellows who are taken with their pretty faces. But Heaven
defend her own boys from marrying girls who have never considered any
other human being in the world but themselves, and whose only law is
their own pleasure! You even hear mothers boast that they have never
taught their daughters how to cook, or sew, or keep house, yet the
very foundation of domestic happiness and the prosperity of the family
depend upon the wife being a thrifty manager and making a comfortable
home.
Nor do women instil into their daughters’ minds the truth about
marriage—that it is an obligation that they take upon themselves, and
that they have no right to throw it up and quit because it is full of
hardships and self-sacrifice instead of being the joy-ride they thought
it would be. Neither do mothers pass on to their daughters their own
hardly won knowledge of how to get along with a husband, how to bear
with him and forbear, how to jolly him and handle him with tact and
diplomacy, yet that precious bit of information would save many a
marriage. Believe me that the most important question that any mother
can ask herself is this: “Am I raising up my son and daughter to bless
or curse the woman and man who marry them?”
XXXVIII
HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND
A young man said to me the other day: “I am going to be married, and
I earnestly and honestly desire to make my wife happy, but beyond a
vague and rudimentary impression that I must not beat or starve her, I
haven’t an idea of how to go about the good-husband job. What should a
man do to keep a woman blessing her lucky stars that she married him,
instead of wondering what on earth the fool-killer was doing that she
survived her wedding day?”
“Well, son,” I replied, “your theoretical ground work for being a good
husband is a sound foundation on which to build, tho refraining from
beating your wife is not the matter of course thing that you seem to
think it is. There will be plenty of times when you will want to do so,
and bitterly regret that no perfect gentleman can lay his hands upon
a woman save in the way of kindness, no matter how much she needs a
thrashing or he yearns to give her one.
“While as for giving a wife sustenance and raiment, believe me, that
to be a good provider is one of the brightest jewels in the crown of
a good husband. No matter what other charms and virtues a man may
have, he is a poor makeshift of a husband if he cannot give his wife a
comfortable living. And, on the other hand, no man is a total failure
as a husband if he laps his wife in luxuries. Jewels, and motorcars,
and fine houses, and fine clothes are a consolation prize that takes
the curse off many a woman’s disappointment in marriage.
“Having, then, accorded your wife considerate treatment and given her a
good home, the next step in being a good husband is to play fair with
her on the money question. Get off on the right foot there and you
will save yourself endless bickerings and prevent her from feeling a
bitterness toward you that will grow and grow until it will kill out
all of her affection for you. The first disillusion that many a bride
gets is when she finds out that the prince of her dreams is a tightwad,
who haggles with her over the market money and who is so stingy that
he never gives her a penny of her own. There isn’t a woman in the
world who is enough of a worm of the dust not to resent having to ask
her husband for the money she knows she earns as a housewife. So go
fifty-fifty with your wife on the money proposition. Give her as big an
allowance as you can afford and be decent enough not to ask her what
she does with it.
“The next item in being a good husband is to be affectionate to your
wife. Don’t expect her to take it for granted that you still love her
because you haven’t applied for a divorce from her. You handed her a
fine and convincing line of love talk while you were courting her, and
there is no excuse for your cutting it off and becoming as dumb as an
oyster just as soon as you’ve got her. No normal woman can live without
love and be happy. It is just as necessary to her well-being as food
and drink, and if she is deprived of it she suffers all of the agonies
of soul starvation, which are worse than those of the body. When you
marry a woman you isolate her from the love-making of other men, and so
you are in honor bound to provide her with an ample supply of soft talk
yourself.
“Therefore, make it a rule of your life to give your wife at least one
kiss every day that has in it some thrill of love and passion, and
that isn’t flavored with ham and eggs like the perfunctory peck on the
cheek or the back of the ear which is all most men hand their wives in
the osculation line. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t neglect to pay your
wife compliments. When she has on a new dress tell her how pretty she
looks and how becoming it is, instead of grunting or demanding to know
how much it costs. If you have eyes enough to see other women’s pretty
clothes and intelligence enough to say the right things about them, why
not about your wife’s, when it will please her to death and make her
think what a wonderful man she has married?
“The next point in being a good husband consists in doing something
actively to make your wife happy and showing a human interest in her.
Many men think they have done their whole duty as husbands when they
furnish their wives with food and shelter and plenty of money. I have
heard men excuse themselves for never remembering an anniversary or
giving their wives a little present by saying that they didn’t know
what Mary or Sally wanted, and that they had charge accounts at the
best jewelers and department stores and could buy themselves whatever
they wanted.
“That kind of thing doesn’t make a woman happy. There isn’t a wife in
the world who wouldn’t get more thrill out of a dollar string of blue
beads that her husband bought because they matched her eyes than she
would out of a pearl necklace that she bought herself on her wedding
anniversary because her husband had forgotten they were ever married.
It is the personal touch that counts with women. The sentiment. The
knowledge that her husband is concerned about her, that he notices when
she is tired, that he appreciates all that she does, that he tries to
make her happy and wants to give her every pleasure that he can.
“If you want to be a good husband, son, remember to do the little
things, and the big things will do themselves. Be affectionate, be
kind, be appreciative, jolly her instead of finding fault with her. Be
liberal in the use of flattery and take her to some place of amusement
at least once a week, and she will thank God on her knees for having
given you to her for a husband.”
XXXIX
GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES
Among my acquaintances is a woman who is always bemoaning the fact that
she cannot give her children “advantages.” She sheds barrels of tears
over their not having the “advantages” that the children of the rich
have. She beats upon her breast and laments that she cannot send her
boys to college, and give them high-powered motorcars, and when she
thinks of not being able to dress her daughters like fashion plates
and send them off to summer and winter resorts, she melts down into a
perfect pulp of self-pity. After listening to this wail for a number of
years, I grew exasperated, and said to her:
“What are the advantages that you cannot give your children? Let us
sit down and consider them dispassionately, and see if your children
really are so unfortunate, and so handicapped in life as you think
they are. Let us begin with your not being able to send your boys off
to college. I grant you that we would all like to give our children
every possible opportunity to acquire a good education. But not all
knowledge comes put up in school-book packages. Furthermore, the
degree a man takes who graduates from the University of Hard Knocks
has a lot of practical, available information, and a working knowledge
of life that is worth a bushel of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that it will
take the college graduate ten or fifteen years to acquire. Many of the
best-informed, best-read men that I know never saw the inside of a
college. In these days of cheap books, and magazines, and newspapers,
if a man wants an education he will get it.
“Nor is the lack of a college education any bar to success. The men
who are running things in America to-day spent their formative years,
from 18 to 24, in learning about mines, and railroads, and stores, and
banking, instead of being grounded in Greek and Latin. And they are
hiring college graduates to work for them. Moreover, while you can lead
a boy to the Pierian spring, you cannot make him drink from it, and you
know well enough that the great majority of boys who are sent off to
college idle away their time, and come back with nothing but a college
yell, the latest thing in Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes, and a maddening
air of superiority. So comfort yourself with the knowledge that if your
son has it in him to take an education he will get it. If he yearns for
culture he will acquire it, but if he is just a boy who has good hard
horse sense, and is not intellectual, the sooner he gets to work after
his high-school days the better for him. Of course, mother-like, you
want your children to have everything that multimillionaires have, but
in your heart you must know that money is a curse to a boy instead of
a blessing. To begin with, wealth paralyzes ambition. We are all poor,
weak creatures who take the line of least resistance, and when we don’t
have to do things we become slackers. We have to have necessity to spur
us on to achievement.
“Call over the roll of the rich men of to-day, of the men who sit
in high places, from the President down, of the men who are famous
inventors, and writers, and artists. They were almost all poor boys.
There is scarcely the name of a millionaire’s son in the whole list.
And riches lead a boy into temptation from which the poor boy is safe.
The boy who has to work for his daily bread has his mind and his
hands occupied. He has something interesting and exciting always to
do. The idle rich boy must make his own diversions, and find some way
of killing time, and he does it only too often by the booze and the
gambling route, and in the company of wild women. For adventuresses
and grafters fasten themselves like leeches on the man with a fat
pocketbook. There is nothing like lacking the price as a first aid to
virtue.
“As for not being able to give your girls advantages, do you really
think it is any advantage to a girl to be brought up to be nothing but
a fashion plate, to have no duties and responsibilities, to have no
object in life except amusing herself and to be taught merely to be
a waster and a spender? Do you think that the woman who has a dozen
homes in this country and Europe, between which she vibrates with no
more local attachments than a transient guest has in a hotel, gets the
pleasure out of them that the woman does out of her little bungalow,
whose every plank has been paid for by some sacrifice and where every
chair and plate is the result of weeks of saving and planning? Do you
think the girl who buys herself a European title is as happy with the
_roué_ husband she has purchased as the girl who marries some clean,
honest young chap she loves and works up with him to prosperity? Do you
think that the woman who bears children and then turns them over to
nurses and governesses gets the benediction out of motherhood that the
woman does who cradles her children on her breast and rears them up at
her knee?
“You lament that you cannot give your daughters the chance to make fine
marriages. Why, the working girl has ten times as good chance to make a
good marriage as the society girl has, because she is thrown with more
men. She works side by side with the go-getters and the coming men,
and she has the pick of them all. So,” I said to my lachrymose friend,
“stop whining because you aren’t rich and can’t give your children
‘advantages.’ You are giving them the necessity of standing on their
own feet and fighting their own battles, of developing all that is best
in them, and that is the greatest advantage that you could possibly
give them.”
XL
SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN
Did you ever contemplate trying to “sell” your children, as the
advertising experts say, the things you wish them to be and do? Did you
ever try selling them yourself? Of course, the old idea is that the
proper way to rear children is by forcing on them a system of do’s and
don’ts. We tell our children that they must do this, and they mustn’t
do that. We try to coerce them along the straight and narrow road
because that is the proper path for them to travel, but we never take
the trouble to artfully entice them into it and make them think that
they have chosen it of their own free wills.
We want our children to love us, to admire us, to consider us their
best friends; but we expect them to do this because we believe it the
duty of children to honor their parents. Not ten fathers and mothers
in a thousand ever deliberately try to make themselves attractive to
their children or win their confidence. Perhaps this is why there are
so many boys and girls hurtling down the broad highway to destruction;
why parental influence amounts to so little, and why the average child
feels that it has less in common with its own father and mother than it
has with any other man and woman it knows.
We have just begun to realize that propaganda is one of the greatest
and most insidious forces on earth. We have seen it lift men up to the
skies and make gods of them, then turn and pull them down, and trample
them into the dust. We have seen it exalt a nation into sainthood
and turn it into a howling mob, crying for blood. And if it can thus
sway and move grown-up people, what a weapon it is to use upon the
plastic mind of a child! This being the case, why should we not “sell”
our children the ideals we wish them to have? Why should we not feed
them on the right propaganda from their cradle up? Why should we not
advertise the good things of life until we make them so alluring that
the child will want them?
Why should we not sell righteousness to our children? It is one thing
to preach and nag at them about drink, and gambling, and associating
with bad men and women until you bore them to tears and make them
wonder what is the fascination of the evil that they are so warned
against. And it is another thing to make clean living the symbol of
health, and strength, and length of days; the respect of one’s fellow
men and, above all, the thing that sets one right with one’s own soul.
Why not sell our children education? We scourge them to school, which
most of them regard as a place of penance, and where, dull and bored,
they sit in stolid indifference, while the dull and bored teachers
go through the perfunctory routine of hearing them recite lessons in
which they do not pretend to take the slightest interest. But suppose
we could really sell these children the idea of education? Suppose
we could get them as interested in history as they are in stories of
adventure? Suppose we could make them see that spelling and arithmetic
are not tasks; that they are the tools with which they will work when
they get their first jobs as stenographers and bookkeepers, and that
the better they spell and the quicker they are at figures the bigger
their pay envelopes will be! Suppose we could make them see that
knowledge is power, and that whether they stay at the foot of the
ladder or climb to the top is going to depend on how well their brains
are trained! Why, if we could make children see the advantages of an
education we would not have to force them to go to school. They would
be eager and anxious to go.
Suppose we sold our children good manners. We are always correcting
Johnny at the table about the way he eats, and he is so used to our
don’ts about walking in front of people and keeping his hat on that
he has long since ceased to listen when we speak. But suppose, from
his earliest infancy, Johnny had heard boors ridiculed, and knife
swallowers, and cup cuddlers, and audible soup-eaters held up to scorn
as figures of fun. Do you not know that Johnny would as soon think of
committing murder as one of these offenses? And suppose Johnny has had
it impressed on him by precept and example that good manners are a
letter of credit that is honored the world over; that they will take
you farther than anything else on earth. Don’t you know that Johnny
would be incapable of loutishness, because good manners had simply been
bred into him?
Why should we not sell our children industry and thrift? Propaganda
again. You can make work the most thrilling of all games. You can make
a child feel that his job is of great importance. You can form in
childhood an unbreakable habit of industry. You can teach the child how
to deny itself little things in order to save the money for big things.
You can make it feel the independence of having its own little bank
account. You can set a goal before it and light the fires of ambition
in its soul.
Finally, why not sell yourself to your children? Why not make as much
effort to ingratiate yourself with your children as you would with
a stranger? Why not try to impress your children with your ability,
your wisdom, your up-to-dateness, as you would any man or woman with
whom you are trying to do business? If parents could only convince
their children that they are not back-numbers and incarnate killjoys
it would do more than any other one thing to improve the family
relationship. Believe me, it pays to advertise—especially with your
children.
XLI
TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”
I wish that I could make every young girl who gets married a present
of a handsomely framed motto to hang on the wall above the mirror of
her dressing table, where she would be compelled to see it every time
she put on or took off her complexion, or repaired the Cupid’s bow
of her lips. On this motto in gorgeously illumined letters would be
these sapient words of Grover Cleveland: “It is a condition and not a
theory that confronts you.” I can think of no other advice in the world
that would be such a lamp to guide the feet of any young woman who is
starting to blunder down the rough road of matrimony, as this cold,
hard, unimaginative assertion of a simple fact. It brushes away with
one gesture of common sense all the dreams and romances and fairy tales
of courtship, and leaves a woman facing the reality of matrimony, which
is never as she thought it would be. It just is as it is.
If women would only abandon their theories about what matrimony
should be, and how husbands should act, and deal with them as they
are, it would save floods of tears, innumerable broken hearts,
hundreds of cases of nervous prostration, and put the divorce courts
out of business. Furthermore, that women are mostly right in their
contentions, and have logic and justice on their side, doesn’t alter
this aspect of the situation at all. For instance, woman’s perpetual
grievance against her husband is his indifference. She wails out that
he inveigled her into matrimony under false pretenses because from the
ardor with which he wooed her, he led her to believe and expect that
he would be an eternal lover and would spend a large part of his time
telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, and how he adored
her. Instead of making good on this antenuptial propaganda, however,
he stopped all of his love-making at the altar with a suddenness that
jarred her wisdom teeth loose, and in place of being a ladylove, she
finds herself merely a household convenience.
Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands
never make love to them, never pay them a compliment, never give them
any sign of appreciation, never take them to any place of amusement,
never give any indication that they still care for them and want them
to be happy. These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly
all of their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a
husband should treat a wife into the discard, and accept the truth
that very few men are sentimentalists. Most of them feel like fools
when they are love-making, and so they get the ordeal over with as
quickly as possible. They consider that when a man marries a woman,
and undertakes her board bill and shopping ticket, that he has given a
proof of devotion strong enough to draw money on at the bank, and there
is no use in saying anything more about it. Also they feel that the
fact that they selected the women they did for wives showed that they
admired them above all other women, so why harp on that string? And, of
course, they want their wives to be happy. What else do they toil for
except to doll their wives up, and give them cars and houses and trips
to Palm Beach?
So the wife may be very happy and contented who has philosophy enough
to take her husband as he is, good, kind and generous, even if he is a
dumb lover, apparently more interested in his business than he is in
her. She realizes that he says it with checks instead of with flowery
phrases, and that if she is starved emotionally she is sure of her
daily roast beef and potatoes. Then there is the matter of adjustment
between a man and a woman. Every bride dreams an impossible dream of
a husband who is chilled steel to all the balance of the world, but
putty in her hands. Experience blows this fair dream to the ends of the
earth, and she finds that she can no more alter her husband’s habits
and prejudices than she can the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He
has his ways, and she can either give in to them or fight over them.
He has his set opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with him
about them.
She can either use tact and diplomacy in handling him, or else be in a
perpetual quarrel with him, and she protests that this isn’t fair or
just. She says that it is as much his place to give in to her as it is
hers to give in to him. That it is just as much his business to deal
subtly with her, as it is her business to deal subtly with him. Of
course, the woman is right, but being right doesn’t help her a bit in
getting along with her husband. It is a condition and not a theory that
confronts her. If any harmonious relations exist between her and her
husband, she has to furnish the harmony. If there is any adapting, it
is the wife who must do the adapting.
Women likewise complain that it is unjust that they should have to do
practically all of the work of making a happy home. They say that it
is just as much a man’s business to be a little ray of sunshine in
the home as it is a woman’s; that it is just as much up to a husband
to wear the smile that won’t come off as it is the wife’s. They say
that there is no more reason why they should read up on subjects that
interest their husbands, so as to be able to hand out a good line of
conversation, than why their husbands shouldn’t read up on fashion
journals so as to be able to discuss intelligently with them the length
of skirts and the latest hair bob. True. But again it is the condition
and not the theory of matrimony that confronts them, and unless the
wife makes the happy home it isn’t made. It is when women forget what
matrimony should be, and deal with it as it is, that they make a
success of it.
XLII
BEING A GOOD WIFE
“I want to be a good wife, the kind of a wife like that lady in the
Bible whose price was above rubies,” said a little bride to me the
other day. “What shall I do to be a real helpmeet to my husband?”
“Well, my dear,” I replied, “there are three general counts on which
every wife must make good in order to help her husband, and then
the job becomes the work of an expert, and varies according to the
temperament of the man. To begin with, every woman who is an asset
instead of a total loss to her husband, must make him a comfortable
home and feed him properly. When a man marries, he practically turns
over his stomach and his nerves and his brains to his wife’s care,
and she can keep him at the peak of efficiency by giving him a quiet,
restful place to come to at night, and a good dinner to eat, or she can
sabotage the whole works by throwing in quarrels and heavy biscuit and
tough meat.
“There is practically no limit to the amount of work a man can do
whose wife takes care of him, and who has a happy home life. The men
who break down with nervous prostration are the men who, after the
struggle and anxiety and worries of a business day, go home to strife
and wrangles and recriminations and nagging and to food that would
kill an ostrich. No nerves and no digestion will stand it. A breakfast
of flabby cakes and muddy coffee, that make him take a dyspeptic and
despairing view of things, and see the world through blue spectacles,
has made many a man turn down a good proposition that would have
carried him on to fame and fortune. A spat with his wife that left his
nerves on edge, and his soul filled with bitterness, has made many a
man quarrel with his partner and insult his best client or customer.
“So, my dear, if you want to help your husband succeed, you must begin
by making him a home wherein his tired body and frazzled nerves may
refresh themselves, so that he may go forth with new strength to battle
with the world. You must make him happy, for there is nothing that
happy people may not achieve. The next item is to keep on cutting bait.
Don’t deceive yourself into thinking that because you have captured
your man he will stay captive. It is a job that has to be done over
again every morning.
“You know the arts and wiles with which you lured him into matrimony.
You recall the pretty dresses you wore, the glad, sweet smile with
which you met him. The pleasure you showed you took in his society. A
man doesn’t put on blinders when he gets married. He still has an eye
out for a pretty woman in a gay frock, and he likes to feel that his
wife still cares enough for him to want to make herself attractive to
him and that his coming home is the big event of the day to her.
“Item three in being a good wife is to be a loving wife. Women are
always talking about being heart-hungry and seem to think that it is an
exclusively feminine complaint, but there are just as many men starving
for affection as there are women. Don’t expect your husband to take
it for granted that you still love him because you haven’t applied
for a divorce. Tell him so. Give him a kiss now and then that isn’t
just a peck on the cheek. But love with discretion. Don’t smother your
husband with affection. Don’t surfeit him on it. Keep your love as a
sweetener for matrimony. Don’t make it the whole diet. Remember that
the most-loved husband in the world said: ‘Feed me with apples, stay me
with flagons, for I am SICK of love.’
“The fourth item in being a good wife is not to expect the impossible
of your husband. Don’t demand that he be a demigod. Accept him as a
poor, faulty human being, even as you are. Don’t have hysterics every
time he topples off of the pedestal on which you have placed him. Help
him up, dust him off and give him a seat beside you. Humor him in his
funny little ways. Sidestep his little prejudices. Don’t argue with
him when your opinions clash. Laugh at his blunders and sympathize with
him when he makes mistakes, and he will make you his confidant and tell
you the truth, which is the finest tribute that any man ever pays his
wife.
“Item five in being a good wife is to be appreciative. When the average
man gets married he sells himself into bondage to his family. The
remainder of his life he spends toiling to keep his wife and children
soft and safe. And whether all this work and sacrifice is worth the
price and is a glorious reward depends altogether on his wife’s
attitude. If she takes it as nothing but her due, it is slavery. But if
she lets him see every day in every way that she thinks that he is the
finest and noblest man that ever lived, and that no be-medaled warrior
has anything on him in heroism, it makes it all worth while and causes
him to feel that being a husband and father is the finest career on
earth.
“Item six in being a good wife is to keep yourself good-natured. Tho
you have all other virtues, yet are a high-tempered virago or a nagger,
you will be a failure as a wife and your husband will curse the day he
married you.
“Item seven is to be a good sport. To take the bad with the good of
matrimony without whining. Not to welch on your part of the work and
sacrifices. To be willing to go where your husband’s fortunes call
him. To fight the battle with him shoulder to shoulder and never to
give up the ship.
“The next way to help your husband is by keeping yourself cheerful and
optimistic. Nothing breaks down a man’s morale so quickly as having a
wife who is whining and complaining, who reproaches him with not making
as much money as other men do, and who lets him see that she does not
believe in him. Now we can only do the things we think we can do, and
when we kill a man’s faith in himself we have slain his ability to
succeed. Ninety-nine husbands out of a hundred live up to their wives’
expectations of them. If their wives are always knocking them and
discouraging them and wet-blanketing their every plan and prophesying
failure, they fail. But if their wives are cheerful and optimistic; if
they encourage them; if they believe in them, and make them believe in
themselves, they succeed. They simply have to make good because their
wives expect it. Most wives write their husbands’ price tags. Price
yours high, and your husband will deliver the goods.
“The next point in being a good wife is for the wife deliberately
to make herself her husband’s best friend. That means that you must
interest yourself in whatever interests him. First and foremost, you
must take an interest in his business. Practically all men like to talk
shop, but they can’t do it to women who yawn in their faces and who
never take the trouble to learn the technique of the business out of
which they get their living. A woman can help her husband not only by
taking an interest in his business, but by making friends for him. Many
a man is advertised into success by his charming wife, and many a man
is bankrupted by his disagreeable and ill-mannered spouse. A woman can
help her husband by using a little common sense in her attitude toward
his business, and by being willing to make the sacrifices necessary to
his success.
“The woman who always speaks of her husband’s office as ‘that old
office,’ and who resents his interest in his business and the time he
devotes to it; the woman who will not let her husband leave a poor job
with no future to it, to take a better one in which he could make his
fortune, because it would take her away from mother and the girls and
Main Street; the doctors’ and dentists’ wives who are jealous of their
husbands’ patients, and the lawyer’s wife who blabs, are all first aids
to their husbands’ failure. Only a man of superhuman talent can succeed
against the handicap of such a wife.
“Then come the two specific ways in which a wife can help her husband,
and which depend on the individual man. Some men have talent, but lack
backbone. They are brilliant but weak. They get easily discouraged and
need to be bucked up and flattered and admired continually. They are
prone to give up, and they need a wife who will hold them to their
purpose when they falter and waver. A wife can help this type of man
best by being a little hard and very ambitious, by bracing him up with
her own strength and literally pushing him on to success. The clinging
vine, helpless sort of women bring out the best that is in other men.
If their wives could stand on their own feet, their husbands would let
them do it, but because their wives can do nothing but hang around
their necks, they feel that they must fight to the death for them.
“This is the reason that for the wife to be thrifty and saving is not
always the best way to help a man. Because many a man has had to hustle
to meet the demands of an extravagant wife he has made the effort that
turned him into a millionaire.
“But mostly, my dear, if you want to help your husband, just love him
enough. Perhaps that is the best way of all.”
XLIII
INVALIDISM A GRAFT
Do you ever think that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be
well? It is just plain stealing. And it is the most despicable form
of petty larceny, because it is robbing those who love you, and trust
you and who are defenseless against you. They cannot lock up their
sympathies, their peace of mind, their personal service, their money,
safely away from your pilfering. Of course, there are many people who
are really ill. Through no fault of their own, they are smitten by some
terrible disease, and they deserve all that we can give of pity and
help as they go stumbling down the agonized way to the grave.
These words are not for them, but for that multitude of men and women
with whom sickness is merely a graft, a camouflage for selfishness, and
a blanket excuse with which they cover up all their sins of omission
and commission, and that furnishes them a perfect alibi for doing
everything they want to do, and leaving undone those things which they
do not wish to do.
Ninety per cent of all the sickness in the world is voluntary, or at
least comes through contributory negligence. People are sick because
they are not willing to make the sacrifices to keep well.
And curiously enough they justify themselves by claiming that their
own health is a personal matter. “If I make myself sick, I am the one
who has to suffer,” they say. If this were true, far be it from the
rest of us to interfere with their pleasures. But it isn’t true. No
man or woman is sick to himself or herself alone. We have to listen to
their groans. We have to minister to them. We have to do their work.
We have to pay their doctor’s bills. We have to put up with their
irritability and unreason because sickness is supposed to give people
_carte blanche_ to do and say all the things that well people do not
dare to do. When ill health is an act of God, as shipping manifests
say, and therefore beyond our control, it is one thing. When it is the
result of weak self-indulgence it is another thing. Our sympathies and
our assistance go out to the victim of tuberculosis or cancer, but we
have nothing but contempt for the glutton who keeps himself sick from
overeating.
In every business house where women are employed there is such a large
percentage of them absent from work on account of sickness, especially
during the winter, that the question is often raised whether the
delicate feminine constitution can stand the strain of commercial life.
Stuff and nonsense! It isn’t the work that is hurting the girls. It is
the way they dress and live.
They feel that they have a perfect right to risk bad colds and
pneumonia by coming to work on rainy, sloppy, sleety days in
paper-soled satin pumps and chiffon stockings, and with not enough
clothes on to keep an icicle warm. They consider it their own affair
if they prefer to spend their money on an imported hat instead of on
nourishing food. They think if they come to the office with a nervous
headache that makes them blind and stupid with pain, and was brought on
by too many nights of successive jazzing, it is a matter between them
and the aspirin bottle alone. But it isn’t. They are not giving their
employers a square deal. They are not giving them the services they
pay for. They are upsetting the routine of the office, and laying the
burden of their work on the shoulders of other people.
Look at the invalid wives you know! Dozens of them who have brought
nervous prostration on themselves by overwork, or too many clubs and
causes, or too much society. Don’t we all know women who go on orgies
of housecleaning, or dressmaking, though they know perfectly well that
every such debauch is going to end up in a spell of sickness which
will call for doctors and trained nurses? Don’t we know women who wear
themselves to tatters over church fairs and club campaigns? Don’t we
know women who play bridge every day until they are so nervous that
they become unbearable at home and their husbands have to send them off
to sanatoriums to get a little peace and rest themselves? We do.
We marvel that these women never stop to consider how they are
defrauding their families. They never consider what a wickedly
dishonest thing it is to deprive a husband and children of a healthy,
strong wife and mother, and give them a neurotic, irritable, cross,
nerve-wrecked creature who makes the home about as cheerful as a
grave-yard, and in which they have always to walk softly and speak in
whispers for fear of disturbing the lady who has just gone to bed with
a neuralgia headache.
Then there is the large army of women who enjoy poor health, who are
professional invalids for the simple reason that they are too lazy and
indolent to make the effort to be well. They are quitters who literally
take life lying down. They cultivate small ailments. They acquire the
sanatorium habit, and they expect to be pitied and babied instead of
being ostracized as dishonest grafters who snatch the very bread out of
the mouths of their families to pay their unnecessary doctor’s bills.
We all know dozens of these women who suffer from imaginary complaints,
and we have seen many of them cured by their husband’s death, when they
had to quit being sick, and go to work and support themselves.
That is why I say that it is dishonest to be sick when you might be
well.
XLIV
SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER
“My daughter is so selfish toward me,” wailed a mother to me the other
day, “she never considers my comfort or happiness in any way whatever.
Since the day she was born I have never had a thought except for her.
I have given her the best of everything. I have worn old clothes in
order that she might have fine new ones. I have done without the things
I wanted that she might indulge her every desire. I have gone to the
places that she wished to go to, instead of the places where I wished
to go. I have cooked and sewed and waited upon her like a slave, but
instead of appreciating all that I have done for her she takes it as
a matter of course. She thinks any old cast-off is good enough for
mother and never dreams of doing anything she doesn’t want to do for my
pleasure. And that is my reward for all the sacrifices I have made for
her!”
“Say rather that, as the result of all the sacrifices that you have
made for your daughter,” I replied, “your girl is just exactly what
you have made her. You have put in twenty-two years of conscientious
work in erecting a monument of selfishness, and you have no right to
complain. You wouldn’t build a house of mud and garbage cans and expect
it to be a white marble palace. How, then, can you expect to build up a
child’s character with all the meanest characteristics of human nature
and expect it to be fine and noble? Impossible. And that is the sort of
miracle that you parents expect from your children when you demand that
they shall be something totally different from the thing into which you
have made them.
“When your daughter was born, she was as plastic as clay in your hands.
It was your privilege to mold her into any shape you pleased. You
could have taught her to be unselfish, to be considerate, to think of
other people, to love and honor and respect you. Instead of that, from
her first conscious moment, you taught her to despise you, to think
you of no account and not worth considering. You taught her to think
only of herself, of her own pleasures and desires, and to get what she
wanted at any cost to others. Now you whine because your teaching has
borne fruit. You are unjust and unreasonable. What we sow, we reap
inevitably. If you make yourself a doormat before your children, they
will walk over you and kick you about, because they naturally think
that you know where you belong in the household and have taken your
proper place.
“They would just as naturally have looked up to you if you had placed
yourself on a pedestal above them and demanded to be worshiped.
Children don’t reason about their parents. They just accept them as
they are and hold them cheap, or dear, according to the way the mother
and father value themselves. I have no tears to shed over the sorrows
of mothers who have selfish and ungrateful daughters, because every
time it is the mother’s own fault. She is to blame, not the girl.
“If she had spent part of the clothes money on getting herself some
pretty frocks, instead of lavishing it all on daughter, daughter would
be proud of mother instead of being ashamed of her. If she had made
daughter help with the housework and the sewing, instead of slaving
over the cookstove and the sewing machine so that daughter might go
free, daughter would think about saving mother and doing things for
her. If she had asserted her rights to her own personal tastes and
pleasures, instead of letting daughter’s tastes and pleasures rule the
household, daughter would show her some consideration and remember
mother’s likes and dislikes, and cater to them. There are mothers who
are queens in their families, just as there are mothers who are nothing
but the maid-of-all-work in their homes, and it rests with every mother
to decide which she will be. It is the queen mothers who are loved and
appreciated, and who have dutiful, unselfish children. The drudge
mother gets only the wages of the drudge from her children.
“In reality, the mother who rears her children up to be monsters of
selfishness has no right to expect appreciation and gratitude from
them because she has done them as ill a turn as one human being can do
another. She has warped their characters. She has developed in them
traits that mar their happiness and are a handicap to success. She has
made them egotists, and they are never satisfied and continually at
variance with those about them. In particular is selfishness a blight
upon a woman’s life, for the selfish woman finds it almost impossible
to make the sacrifices that wifehood and motherhood demand of her. One
of the main reasons why divorce is so prevalent is because when so many
selfish girls find that they can’t treat their husbands as they did
their mothers, they throw up their hands and quit.
“And so,” I said to the mother of the selfish daughter, “you are unfair
to your daughter. Don’t blame her for being what you made her. What
else could you expect?”
XLV
SELF-CONTROL
If I were to go to a mother who was cradling her babe on her breast,
and tell her that I knew a magic formula by which she could insure
power, and prosperity, and happiness to her child, she would impoverish
herself to purchase this knowledge from me, and fall on her knees and
bless me for having given it to her.
Yet I know just such a bit of white magic. In her secret soul every
mother herself knows it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is
either too weak or too lazy to use it.
This charm that would have changed all life for innumerable people;
that would have kept men out of prisons, and women out of brothels;
that would have turned paupers into rich men; made the unsuccessful
successful and stopped the wheels of the divorce court—consists simply
in teaching children self-control.
Almost every misfortune under which humanity suffers goes straight back
to that. There is hardly a derelict in the world who cannot say: “I
would not be what I am if my mother had taught me to control myself.”
For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom of most of our
sins of omission and commission.
Look at the murderer going to the death chair. Not once in a thousand
times is he a cold-blooded murderer; but he was a high-tempered child
whose mother never taught him to control himself. There came a day when
something irritated him more than usual and, aflame with anger, he took
a fellow creature’s life. It is the supreme manifestation of the same
spirit that made him kick the chair against which he stumbled as a
child and beat with impotent little fists all who thwarted him.
Look at the drunkard wallowing in the gutter. He is there because his
mother never taught him to control his appetites. He is the logical
outgrowth of the greedy little boy who was permitted to gorge himself
on cake and candy until it made him ill.
Look at the poor, shabby, out-at-elbows man who has drifted from job to
job all his life, and has never been able to make a decent support for
himself and his family. He is his mother’s handiwork. She put the curse
of incompetence on him when she let him give up every undertaking the
moment he struck the hard sledding in it.
He changed from one school to another because the lessons were too
difficult, or the teacher was too strict. When he started to work, he
left one place because the hours were too long, another because his
boss was too exacting. He tried a dozen different occupations that he
left because he found they had unpleasant features and involved doing
uncongenial tasks. He is a down-and-outer because his mother never
taught him the self-control that makes a man set his teeth and go
through with the business to which he has put his hand.
Look at the girls who go astray. Not one of “the sorrowful sisterhood”
as the Japanese pitifully call them, but who is what she is because her
mother did not teach her self-control. Did the girl sin because she was
so weak and so in love with some vicious libertine that she listened
to her heart instead of her head? Her mother could have saved her from
a fate worse than death if she had taught her to control her emotions,
instead of being ruled by them.
Did the girl sell her soul for fine clothes, and good times? Again
the mother’s fault for not teaching the girl self-control, and to do
without the things that she could not honestly get.
Look at the poor old people who are dependent on their children, or
the grudging charity of relatives and friends. In how many cases is
their unhappy fate simply the result of their lack of self-control!
They have had their chance of fortune. As long as the man was able to
work he made plenty of money, and they lived luxuriously, but they
spent everything as they went along. They laid up nothing for their
rainy day, and when it came, it found them paupers and parasites. The
difference between dependence and independence, between comfort and
misery in your old age depends upon how much self-control you have had
in your youth.
Look at the ever increasing number of divorces. Look at the forlorn
half-orphan children, and broken up homes. Look at the unhappy married
couples you know. What is the real cause of all this domestic trouble?
Merely that mothers do not teach their children self-control. They
raise up spoiled, selfish daughters who never consider a thing in life
but their own pleasure.
They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another
human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills,
unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they
fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or
a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage,
and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their
children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.
You can teach a baby three weeks old self-control by refusing to give
it the thing it howls for. Say to the toddler that falls and bumps its
nose, “Mother’s brave boy doesn’t cry,” and it will bite back the sobs.
It will yell the roof off if you pity it. A child of three will be
obedient, cheerful, respectful of the rights of others, or he will be
a little demon, according to the way his mother has brought him up.
If she has taught him self-control, she has given him the magic that
works all the miracles of life, and if she hasn’t, she has done him the
greatest wrong that any human being can possibly do to another human
being.
XLVI
OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS
“O dear Miss Dix,” wails a little flapper, “won’t you please help
me? Won’t you please try to make my father understand that I must do
as people do now, instead of doing the way that he did when he was
young? I’ve got the best daddy in the world, and I love him with all
my heart; but he is ruining my life trying to make me the sort of girl
that he says mother was. And I’m not mother. I am myself, and I don’t
live thirty years ago. I live now, and I have to be a model girl of
now or else a back-number at whom nobody will look and whom nobody
wants. Father says he is an old-fashioned father, and he is trying
to make me an old-fashioned girl. I never have any up-to-the-minute
clothes because mother didn’t wear short skirts and no corsets and bob
her hair. I can’t go joy-riding with a crowd because they didn’t have
automobiles when father was young. I have to be home at 11 o’clock when
I go out in the evening because he says that he never stayed out late
when he was young.
“I can’t dance because father didn’t jazz and he doesn’t think the
modern dances respectable. He won’t let me read any of the six best
sellers because he doesn’t approve of modern literature, and he makes
me read old-fashioned books that I almost yawn my head off over. And
he just simply loathes all the boys who come to see me. Calls them
sapheads, and he wonders why I want to waste my time talking nonsense
with little jellybeans such as they are. He says it is just appalling
to see how youth has deteriorated since his day, and that when he was
young the boys and girls were all serious-minded young people, who
cared only for rational amusements, and that instead of chasing around
to cabarets they spent the evening at home in intelligent conversation.
“I suppose we young ones are a poor lot compared to what our parents
were; but such as we are, we are. In Rome you have to do as the Romans
do or else you get left. I want to play with the other girls and boys,
but I can’t unless I play the way they do. My father is always talking
about home being woman’s proper sphere, and wifehood and motherhood
being a woman’s noblest career. But how am I to get married if I am
never permitted to have any dates with boys? You might just as well
lock a girl up in a stone cell and throw away the key as not to let her
do what the other girls are doing. There are too many pretty girls,
with lots of fun and pep in them, that the boys can run around with,
for them to take the trouble to hunt up one that is laid up on the
shelf and labeled ‘old-fashioned.’ And when I tell my father this he
gets angry and I cry, and I don’t know what to do because I don’t want
to disobey him and I don’t want to waste my youth sticking around at
home and having no pleasure.”
“Alas, my dear,” I said, “your father is trying to foist his ideals
on you, just as his father tried to foist his ideals on him. Each
generation tries to do it and each makes dark prophecies about what
the present generation is coming to. Your grandfather thought bustles
just as dreadful as your father thinks rolled stockings are. Your
grandfather disapproved of side-bar buggies just as much as your father
does of automobiles. Your grandfather considered the waltz just as
indecent as your father does shimmying. Your grandfather thought your
father should only read Shakespeare and Richardson, and considered
Dickens frivolous, just as your father thinks you ought to read Dickens
instead of ‘The Sheik.’ And your grandfather told your father how
superior the young men of his day were, and how they spent their time
in improving their minds and always went to bed with the chickens, and
how they doted on intellectual conversation, just as his father told
him and great-great-great-great-grandfather told his son.
“And it is all stuff and nonsense. Not a word of it has ever been true.
Each succeeding generation of young people have been pleasure-loving
and laughter-loving and foolish, and have danced and played and
skylarked. And all the difference is that their games have taken on
different phases in different ages. It is a pity that fathers and
mothers cannot remember this. If they did and would look on with
sympathy and understanding, they could keep close enough to their
children to know what they are doing and to stretch out a hand and hold
them steady when they start to go wild, and to snatch them back when
they get too near to the edge of the pit. For youth will be served.
Youth must have its fling. High spirits must find a vent. Suppress
these with the heavy hand of authority and something blows up.
“Lock a girl in her room, and she will climb out of the window. Forbid
her to see boys at home, and she will meet them on the street. Refuse
to let her go to nice dances, and she will slip away to low dance
halls. The wildest and most reckless girls are invariably those with
the strictest parents. The young people of to-day live in the world of
to-day and must do as they do to-day. Parents must recognize that and
deal with them on that platform if they wish to do their duty by their
children.”
XLVII
LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE
One of the most curious superstitions in the world is the childlike
belief that men have in the indestructibility of women’s love.
They visualize the feminine heart as a sort of perpetual-motion
machine that, once they press the button and set it to work, goes on
automatically pumping up affection for them as long as they live,
and they think that nothing they do or say ever interferes with its
functioning. In a word, they believe that if a man wins a woman’s love
it is his for keeps. He can’t lose it or mislay it. The poor thing
has no choice but to go on adoring him to the end, because she is
built that way. It is a comfortable and consoling theory, and men take
liberties with it, but the trouble is that it isn’t true. In reality,
women are just as fickle as men are, and just as few women as men
are capable of a deep and abiding love. Women’s fancies are just as
unstable as men’s. They are just as much lured by a handsome face and
fall as easily for a smooth line of soft talk. And there are just as
many wives who get tired of their husbands as there are husbands who
are weary of their wives.
The only difference between the sexes in the matter is that women face
the situation, while men shut their eyes to it and refuse to recognize
that it exists. Every woman knows that because a man was in love with
her when he married her is no indication that he is going to remain in
love with her to the end of the chapter. She knows that if she keeps
her husband’s affection she has to be up and doing, and on the job.
That is why there are millions of women undergoing all the agonies of
slow starvation trying to maintain a girlish figure; why millions are
boiled alive and thumped and scalped in beauty parlors, and why the
nation spends more a year for face paint than it does for house paint,
and why, wherever we go, we see fat, middle-aged, bread-and-butter
wives attempting to look like flappers and acquire the technique of the
vamp in order to keep their husbands nailed to their own firesides.
Apparently, however, it never occurs to a man that there is the
slightest necessity to make any effort to keep his wife fascinated and
to prevent her eyes from roaming around in search of a sheik. He may
be bay-windowed and bald, but if he reduces it is only on his doctor’s
orders, and not because he wants to look boyish to his wife. And he
never buys a toupee until after he becomes a widower and begins to take
notice again. The idea that his wife might cease to love him actually
never crosses the average man’s mind. He is convinced that she couldn’t
do it. It is some peculiarity of the feminine constitution that makes
a woman go on loving what has become unlovable. Now, with a man it is
different, of course. He realizes that he couldn’t stay very long in
love with a woman who was slouchy, and sloppy, and untidy looking, who
came to breakfast in a dirty kimono and run down at the heel slippers.
Nor would he take much interest in kissing a cheek smeared with cold
cream.
But he doesn’t see why his wife shouldn’t still regard him as a
romantic figure when he goes around in a soiled shirt and a rumpled
collar, with grease spots on his coat and trousers that bag at the
knees, and offers to her lips a countenance with a two days’ stubble of
beard on it.
A man knows well enough that, as far as he is concerned, the only way
to keep the love fires burning is to keep piling the fuel on it and
pouring over it the oil of flattery and praise. But he thinks that
you don’t have to put any more fuel on the fire of a woman’s heart,
because it is a flame that miraculously replenishes itself. So after he
marries he never bothers to show her any attention, or to pay her any
compliments, or to tell her that he loves her, or give any indication
that he regards her as anything but a piece of useful household
furniture. If any woman ever treated him that way his affection
would mighty soon starve to death, but he never has the slightest
apprehension that his wife’s love will perish on the same meager
rations.
There are men who abuse their wives, who swear at them, and curse them,
and speak to them as if they were dogs. There are men whose wives live
in trembling fear of their tempers. There are men who are stingy and
who do not give to their wives, who spend their lives slaving for them,
the poorest wage of an ill-paid servant. Yet these men go on believing
that their wives still love them because they loved them in the days of
courtship, when they were handsome, gallant, and neat, and attractive,
and loving, and flattering, and generous, and considerate swains.
Such men befool themselves by thinking that they cannot kill a woman’s
love. Never was there a greater mistake. A woman’s love is as delicate
and as fragile a thing as a flower that you can crush with a finger.
And it takes never-ending skill, and care, and cherishing to keep it
alive. You can kill it with disgust. You can kill it with unkindness.
You can kill it with injustice. You can kill it with neglect, and it
would surprise many a man who still believes that his wife loves him in
spite of the way he has treated her, in spite of his indifference to
her, to know that her love for him has been dead so long that she has
almost forgotten that she ever cared for him at all.
So I warn you, Mr. Man, not to put any faith in the theory that you
can’t kill a woman’s love. Women are like men; they only love the
lovable. And if you wish to retain your wife’s affections, you have got
to continue after marriage the same tactics you used in winning her.
XLVIII
THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN
A man wants to know why married men have such a fascination for girls,
and wherein a benedict’s wooing differs from that of a bachelor. The
first part of this double-barreled question was answered by Eve in the
Garden of Eden, and every girl takes after her greatest grandmother.
Married men are forbidden fruit, and that alone whets the appetite of
the foolish little Evelyns for them, and makes them seem the prize
pippins of the whole matrimonial orchard. The thing that a woman cannot
have, that she has no right to have, and especially the thing that some
other woman possesses, is always the thing that she wants most. If
you have ever watched women fight over a commonplace and unattractive
article on a bargain table, where each was determined to have it just
because the others desired it, you have the psychological explanation
of why a girl falls for a married man that she wouldn’t look at if he
were single.
Also, women are the adventurous sex. They love to play with danger as a
child plays with fire, and a large part of the lure of the married man
consists in the fact that a girl knows that when she has an affair with
one, she is risking every shred of her reputation, and gambling with
her happiness, and that any minute she may be cited as a corespondent,
and dragged into the slime of the divorce courts.
Also, the average girl is simply slopping over with romance, and
somehow she gets more kick out of being wooed under the rose than she
does in an above board, honest-to-God courtship. There is something
about the secrecy of a love intrigue with a married man, about the
surreptitious letters, about the stolen rendezvous, that thrills her to
the core of her being. It makes her feel so desperately wicked, like
one of the grand passion heroines of her favorite novels, who cried
“All for love, and the world well lost” as she chucked her bonnet over
the windmill.
It is because the married man is the only man in the world who is out
of her reach, and whom she has no right to try to grab; it is because
some other woman has set her seal of approval on him by marrying him;
it is because an illicit love episode is a streak of lurid romance in
her drab days, that the little Totties and Flossies are able to see
the hero of their girlish dreams in the fat, bald-headed, middle-aged
men for whom they work, and the Mauds and Gwendolyns imagine that they
have found their affinities in some ordinary commonplace married man,
who would bore them to tears if his wedding ring had not given him a
fictitious value in their eyes.
Add to this, vanity and cruelty. In the man hunt, women look on the
married man as big game, and when they bring one down they feel as if
they had captured an elephant instead of having shot a tame rabbit.
There are girls who boast of their conquests among married men, and
who have so little heart that they delight in watching the agonies of
jealousy that they inflict on the poor defenseless wife. Many young
women are likewise gold-diggers, and these virtually confine their
attentions to married men, as wealthy bachelors are few and well-to-do
middle-aged married men are plentiful and easy.
Why the married man who starts out as a Lothario is an easy winner
of feminine hearts is perfectly obvious. To begin with, he has the
same advantage that the widower has over the single man. He is a
professional, so to speak, instead of an amateur lover. He has the
education in women that only marriage can give a man, for he has had a
wife and, like the wise man of Kipling’s poem, he “learned about women
from her.” He has found out that all women are so hungry for love that
they will swallow any soft talk without examining its quality. He has
found out that you can jolly a woman into anything. He has found out
that women melt down into a mush that you can do with as you will,
under a little understanding and sympathy. He has found out that if you
remember an anniversary, and a woman’s taste in two or three things,
she will believe it an absolute proof of undying devotion.
The married man knows that there is one sure short cut to virtually
every woman’s heart. It is pity. And so he begins his love-making by
telling the girl that his wife does not understand him, that she is
not his real soul-mate, that they have nothing in common, and that his
home is bleak, and barren, and unhappy. Generally he accuses his wife
of being a human iceberg, while he is a perfect geyser of love and
tenderness. And then he moans: “Oh, why did we not meet in time?” And
the poor little idiot of a girl undertakes the consolation rôle.
Of course, all of this effective love play is more or less impossible
to the bachelor. He lacks the technique of the married man. He cannot
appeal to a woman’s sympathies, or pose before her in the rôle of a
martyr. He can only make love in the commonplace old way, and it cramps
his style. But the real reason that the married man is a devil among
women is just the same old reason that made Eve listen to the serpent.
XLIX
FORGET IT
Every day some girl writes me that she is young, quite as pretty as the
other girls about her, that she dresses as well, and makes as good an
appearance as they do, and strives to please, but that no man ever pays
her the slightest attention, or asks her to step out with him of an
evening. Then this girl goes on to say that she is a business girl, but
she doesn’t make a very good salary, and she is discouraged, and blue,
and wants to know what to do.
My advice to a girl in this situation—and there are millions of her—is
to forget men. Give up the struggle to attract them. Quit trying to
catch one. Renounce romance. Throw away all thoughts of marriage. Just
accept the fact that nature did not put you in the vamp class, and play
your game of life from that angle.
This counsel will be a bitter pill for the girl to swallow, but she
will find it good medicine that will work a speedy and permanent cure,
if she will try it on herself. Why certain women are magnets that draw
every man they meet to them, and why nothing in trousers except upon
compulsion ever goes near other women just as good looking, just as
charming in every way, is one of the mysteries nobody has ever solved.
Nor has anyone ever been able to suggest a remedy for this state of
affairs.
The fast steamship, the lightning express, the aeroplane, have
annihilated distance, but human ingenuity has failed to invent any
device to make a boy go to see the girl next door if he doesn’t want
to go. Science has torn its secrets from the earth, but it cannot find
out what quality it is in woman that attracts men. It has invented
chemicals that work magic in the physical world, but it has never
discovered a reliable love philter.
So that’s that. And it is a wise girl who has the courage to look
herself in the face, and see whether she has the “come hither” look in
her eye, and if she hasn’t, to recognize the fact, and devote herself
to a more promising occupation than chasing men, who, in the end,
always make their getaway, unless they desire to be caught.
Therefore, I would urge the girl who does not make a spontaneous hit
with men, to quit wasting her time and her energies in the vain attempt
to decoy them into noticing her, and to put all that lost motion and
force into her work, where she will get better results.
Believe me, if the girl who does not attract men, tried as hard to
sell herself to her job as she does to sell herself socially, she would
not have to complain long of holding a small position. She would be a
highly paid secretary, or buyer, or department manager.
If the girl who does not attract men, studied her employer’s moods and
tenses as earnestly as she does those of some little jellybean, and
if she was as anxious to please her employer as she is to please the
jazz hounds and cakeaters she meets, she would find herself one of the
valued employees who are always spoken of reverentially as “our Miss
So-and so.”
If the girl who never has a date would put in one hundredth part of
the intensive study on her work that she gives to the technique of the
popular girl, and to trying to find out something about the psychology
of customers or the history of the goods she handles, or the details of
the business she is employed in, she would have employers fighting over
her.
In a word, if the girl who is not popular with men would concentrate
her thoughts, her interests, and her ambitions, on getting ahead in the
occupation she has chosen, instead of wasting her time and energies in
a fruitless attempt to charm men, she would be a success instead of a
failure; she would be happy instead of miserable.
As it is now she falls between the stools. She is a poor makeshift in
her job, who gets nowhere, because her one desire, her one ambition,
her one aim in life is to attract men and catch a husband, and she is
miserable, and discouraged, and bitter, and disgruntled, because she
is balked in that attempt. And she is a siren without allure who never
arrives at the altar, so she fails both as a business woman, and in her
effort to catch a husband.
This is a great pity, because while love and marriage are highly
desirable blessings to come into a woman’s life, they are not the whole
of life. The world is full of such a lot of things besides sentiment.
There is independence, the freedom to come and go as one pleases. There
is the exhilarating sport of climbing up the ladder of success, which
has a million thrills for every round. There is the solid satisfaction
of achievement. There is the good job that keeps one on one’s tiptoes
so that one never has a dull moment. There is the happiness that comes
of being employed in constructive work. There is one’s own home, with
one’s own pots, and pans, and doilies, if one wants them.
Take it from me, girls, the woman who espouses a career does not get
the worst husband there is. She has a life companion from whom she
never has to wheedle the pennies. She never has to listen to any back
talk or criticisms. She is never afraid of this companion getting tired
and running off after flappers. It is only the lucky women, who make
exceptional marriages, who are as well off as the business girls who do
not marry.
Furthermore, there is this comfort to be given the girl who quits
trying to attract men, and gets busy with her job. Men are contrary
creatures. Pursue them, and they flee from you. Lay traps, and
they walk wide of them. But let them alone, indicate that you are
indifferent to them; that you are concerned with your own affairs in
which they have no part; let them realize that you can get on quite
well without them, and it piques their interest. They come flocking
around of their own accord to see what manner of woman you are.
Also the girl who makes something of herself, and who rises high in her
profession is thrown with the men at the top, the men of brains, and
they are often attracted to her while the silly little boys with whom
she used to play about were not.
So I say again to the girls who are not attractive to men, stop wasting
your time in the useless attempt to vamp men. Put your heart and your
soul into your job. Work is the consolation prize God gives us when we
miss getting the thing we wanted most.
L
LOST LOVE
Many women ask me how they can regain the love of some man which they
have lost. Sometimes, a girl tells me, weeping, of a once ardent lover
who has become cold and neglectful, who no longer comes to see her, and
she wants to know how to bring him back, and make him once more crazy
about her.
Oftenest, however, it is a wife who seeks desperately for some magic
whereby she can light again the love fires in the heart of a husband
who has ceased to care for her, who is tired of her, and who does not
even take the trouble to hide from her the fact that he regards her as
a burden, of which he would rid himself if he could.
It is the tragedy of these women that they are doomed to love men
after the men no longer love them. Not even neglect, and insult, and
faithlessness, kill their affection for those on whom they have set
their foolish, doglike hearts. So they cling with desperate hands to
the men who are trying to break away from them, hoping against hope,
praying some miracle will happen that will give them back their lost
love.
But their prayers are never answered. The miracle never happens. No
sorcerer can teach a woman how to weave a spell a second time about
a man. The love potions that the credulous buy from fortune tellers,
never work, and though a woman conjure never so deftly, she cannot
bring back the heart that has slipped out of her keeping.
For of all dead things, nothing is so dead as dead love. No power can
breathe into it again the breath of life, and make it a vital thing
once more.
We do not know why we love. We do not know why some particular man or
woman makes a peculiar appeal that makes us prefer him or her to all
the other men and women in the world. We do not know why the touch
of certain hands thrill us; why the quirk of a smile, or the look in
an eye, draws us; why we have a sense of comradeship with certain
individuals; why some man or woman fascinates us; or why we desire
one man or woman more than another, who may be better looking, more
intelligent, more worthy in every way.
Nor do we any more know why we cease to love than we know why we love.
We do not know why the touch of the hand that has thrilled us ceases
to thrill; nor why the charm that was once so potent vanishes into
thin air, nor why the fascination flees, and the one who once held us
enthralled becomes a bore who wearies us to tears. It just happens,
and we are as helpless before one situation as before the other.
There are not many men who are cruel enough to find sport in breaking
a woman’s heart, and who deliberately win a girl’s love, and play with
it, and fling it away. There are not many husbands who would not remain
their wives’ eternal lovers, if it was in their power to control their
affections. That was their romantic dream when they married. That way
their happiness lay, and they would have kept their romance had it been
a matter of their own volition.
Unfortunately, the disillusion came. The glory and the circling wings
departed. Somehow their wives lost their allure for them, and strive
as they might, they could not see them again with the eyes of a lover,
or bring back their charm. Many a man would be just as glad to fall in
love again with his wife as she would be to have him fall in love with
her once more, but he cannot do it. You cannot fan dead ashes into a
flame.
Perhaps if wives realized how impossible it is to resurrect a dead
love, they would guard the living love more carefully, and run fewer
risks of killing it. They would not take the chance of disillusioning
their husbands by going about sloppy and slovenly at home, and thus
presenting a fatal contrast to the trimly dressed women in their
offices, and the beautified ladies they meet in society. They would
reflect that no man would have much appetite for domestic kisses when
flavored with cold cream, and that if a wife wishes to be regarded as
a ladylove, she must look the part instead of resembling a sack of
potatoes.
And they would see to it that love is not assassinated on their
hearthstones by ceaseless, senseless quarrels, by whining, and
complaining, and nagging, and petty tyrannies. Nor would they permit
love to die of that commonest and most deadly ailment, boredom. For if
a woman can interest her husband enough before marriage to make him
pick her out from all the rest of the world for his life partner, she
can interest him enough to hold him until the end of the chapter if she
is willing to take the trouble and perform the labor necessary to do so.
If, though, a woman, through carelessness or ignorance, has lost the
love of the man she loves, there is absolutely no way in which she can
win it back. Through duty or a sense of honor she may hold his body,
but his soul has gone from her forever, and she is wise if she accepts
the inevitable.
If she is a girl, she should let the sweetheart who is tired of her go,
instead of trying to hold him. Some other man she may make love her,
but not the old one for whom she has lost her charm.
If she is a married woman whose husband has ceased to love her, let
her agonize no more over the impossible task of reviving his passion
for her. Let her fill her life with other interests and thank God that
there are so many other pleasant things in the world besides love.
For of this she may rest assured. There is no reviving of dead love.
When once we have lost our taste for a person everything is over. It is
finished, as the French say.
LI
THE SHOW WEDDING
The Turks have passed a law prohibiting elaborate and costly
marriage ceremonials, and forbidding the giving of expensive wedding
presents. What a pity that we cannot have such an edict issued in
this country! For there is no other one thing that would do more to
allay heartburnings and jealousies, prevent nervous prostration and
bankruptcy, and promote peace and thrift than to officially “can” the
show wedding.
In all fairness, we must admit that the display wedding is a feminine
vice. No man, probably, ever really yearned to make a public exhibition
of himself as he was being led as a lamb to the slaughter. But by the
time she is ten years old the average girl has begun planning her
wedding and deciding whether she will have a big church affair, with
ushers and flower girls and ring-bearers and maids and matrons of honor
and bridesmaids and a white satin dress and a real lace veil, and
all the other flubdubs, or whether she will be married at home under
a floral canopy, with an admiring audience fenced off from her by
white ribbons. And to realize this ten-minute splurge she is ready to
ruthlessly ruin her family and half kill herself. If she doesn’t get
it, she goes through life feeling that she has missed her big moment.
It is from this silly, dopey daydream that women should be rescued by
law, since few of them have the common sense and good taste to put it
aside themselves.
To begin with, it would do away with the disgraceful, barefaced holdups
that precede weddings. These are camouflaged under the appropriate
name of “showers,” for they cause every friend of an engaged girl to
shed salt and bitter tears at the realization of how much they will be
mulcted for in silk-stocking showers, and handkerchief showers, and
towel showers, and kitchen showers, and all the other showers that
go to make up a bridal deluge. It would also prevent that sinking
feeling at the pit of the stomach with which we are attacked at sight
of a large, thick white envelope in the mail. We know that it means a
“stand-and-deliver” present, which somehow always comes just at a time
when the rent is overdue, or a doctor bill has to be paid, or we had
saved up a little money by pinching economies to buy a new hat or suit.
It isn’t that we are stingy or mean, or that we begrudge a gift to a
friend. It is only that we would like to give when we can do so freely,
and enjoy the giving, instead of having to give at a time when it is
actually dishonest to bestow a present. Why, I have known people who
had to put off needed dental work or taking a sick child to the country
when three or four wedding presents fell together. The wedding gift
was a debt of honor. “They sent us a set of salad forks.” “She gave us
a clock when we were married,” and it had to be returned in kind. The
abolition of the show wedding would prolong the days of many a poor,
old, hard-worked father, whose daughter’s trousseau is the straw that
breaks the camel’s back.
It is not because she needs them, or has any use for them, that
Sally Ann, who is a poor girl marrying a poor young man, has to have
piles of orchid chiffon undergarments, hand-embroidered and belaced
and beribboned. It is because they are to be displayed to her catty
friends, who will finger them, and appraise them, and criticize them,
and then go home wondering how her father is ever going to pay for
them. If her lingerie were not Exhibit A at the wedding Sally Ann would
go along and provide herself with a reasonable amount of underwear that
would stand wear and washing, and not run papa into debt.
But Sally Ann has to have her show wedding. She has to trail up the
church aisle in her white satin and her tulle veil, and all the rest
of it. And by the time father has paid for the church and the flowers,
and the bridesmaid’s presents, and the reception, and the automobiles,
he has had to borrow money at the bank and has saddled himself with a
debt that bends his back a little more, and puts new lines in his face,
and adds to his burden in work and worry, which was already more than
he could bear. And it has all been for a few minutes’ flaunting of
herself in the face of an audience of people who smiled and nudged each
other, and said: “Did you ever see her look so homely? Brides always
look their worst.” “Wonder what he ever saw in her to make him pick her
out.” “Is that the bridegroom? Looks like a scared rabbit.” “How on
earth do you suppose her father will ever pay for this? Everybody knows
he can’t afford it,” and so on, and so on. Just what everybody says at
a wedding.
Above all, the abolition of the show wedding and the saving of the
foolish expenditure it involved would enable many a young couple to set
up housekeeping out of debt; and, best of all, they would begin life
simply and honestly, and with the admiration and gratitude of all who
know them. Getting married is the crucial act in a man’s and woman’s
life. It is the most awful and solemn thing they ever do. And why they
want to have a thousand curious eyes peering at them when they take the
step that is going to plunge them into hell or lift them into heaven
passes comprehension. It would not be more incongruous to send out
invitations to people to come and watch you die than it is to come and
see you married.
Wise that young couple who simply slip around to the parson and make
their vows at the altar, with no one but God to look on.
LII
WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE
Parents seem to run to extremes. Of the common, or garden, variety
of fathers and mothers there appears to be two types. One is the
overindulgent, which lavishes too much money, too many fine clothes,
too many motorcars on its offspring, and that brings up its children to
be idle and worthless wasters and spenders. The other type of parent is
the Spartan one that is as hard as nails, unsympathetic, close-fisted;
that denies its children every indulgence, and that holds to the theory
that the harder it makes life for the young the better it is for them.
Both schools of thought are wrong.
Undoubtedly, parents make a very great mistake when they sacrifice
everything to their children and make doormats of themselves for their
children to walk on. They weaken their sons and daughters by pampering
them too much and by standing between them and the struggle that alone
makes muscle of body and soul, and they do their children a cruel
injustice by cultivating in them extravagant tastes and habits that
perhaps they cannot later on give them the money to gratify. Certainly
it is an unedifying spectacle to behold, as we often do, a mother in
patched, made-over clothes, while her daughters fare forth in the
latest imported Parisian models, or a seedy father riding on the street
car while son burns up the road in a speedy sports car and is decked
out like Solomon in all his glory.
Also we can but deplore the folly of parents who skimp, and slave, and
deny themselves every comfort in order that their daughters can make
a splurge in society, and that their sons may loaf through college
courses, where they acquire nothing but a college yell and a contempt
for their hump-shouldered old dads. We could weep when we see tired
old women who are converted into unpaid nursemaids by their married
daughters who are always coming in and dumping their babies down on
mother when they want to go off on a trip or play bridge. And what
tears we have left we could shed over the men whose sons are always
getting into trouble and coming back to father for help when they know
that they are robbing him of the pittance he has saved up for his old
age.
But between doing everything for your children and doing nothing at all
for them is a long step, and the parents who do not help their children
to get a start in life fail just as much in doing their duty to them as
do the foolishly fond parents who kill their children’s initiative by
swaddling them in cotton wool. Of course, necessity is a grim teacher.
If you chuck a child into the water where it must sink or swim, it is
pretty apt to strike out and keep afloat somehow. And it is true that
a great many successful men and women are the children of parents who
were so poor that they could do nothing for them, and that they fought
their way to an education and battled their way to success against all
sorts of hardships. But there is a great difference between the parents
who cannot help their children and those who will not help their
children, between the fathers and mothers who would give their heart’s
blood to their children and those who will not give them a few dollars.
And while the children may feel all love and reverence for the poor
parents who were powerless to assist them, they can but feel bitter
resentment toward the parents who stand callously by, watching their
struggles without holding out a helping hand.
A large number of parents have an idea that it does young people good
to be deprived of pleasures, to be reared to no indulgences, to know
hardships. And so even when they have plenty of money they deny their
children pretty clothes and the advantages of education and travel, and
when they get married they let them scuffle for themselves. They do not
give the girl a dowry nor set the boy up in business.
It seems to me that this is a cruel and an inhuman thing to do, and
that it serves no purpose but to kill in the child’s breast every
particle of affection it had for its father and mother. For it dooms
the children to years of struggle and self-sacrifice, pinching
economies and anxieties that it might so easily have escaped. And God
knows that life is not so easy for any of us that we can afford to have
any of the pleasure taken out of it.
It also often shuts the door of opportunity for the child or puts off
success for many weary years. The few thousands of dollars that father
might have invested in the firm which would have raised Tom from being
a clerk to a partner might have carried him on to fortune. If father
would have financed the extra course of study in his profession for
John, he would have achieved success and begun big money making years
before he did. If father had given Mary an allowance big enough to
hire servants, she would not have worked herself to death cooking, and
washing, and baby tending. But father wouldn’t do it. He held on to
every penny and let his children fight it out the best way they could.
The daughter of such a man once said to me:
“My father is dead and I have inherited a large fortune, but it has
come to me too late to do me any real good. When I was a girl I never
had any pretty clothes. I never had a nice home to invite my friends
to. I never had any indulgences. I never could even go with the people
I was entitled to go with because I did not live in the style they did.
I married a poor man and my father never helped us. I wore my youth out
in housework that I was not strong enough to do. If he had given me
$10,000 when I needed it, it would have done me more good than all that
I have inherited does me now.”
The moral of all of which is, do not sacrifice yourself to your
children; do not impoverish yourself for them, but help than all you
can while they are young and while they need it, if you do not wish
them to be glad when you are dead and your will is read.
LIII
WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?
Do you ever ask yourself if you are not paying too high a price for
many of the things in which you indulge yourself? So far as material
things go, most of us are keen enough about seeing that we get our
money’s worth. We do not pay a thousand dollars for a string of glass
beads. We do not buy a battered flivver at Rolls Royce figures, nor
will we stand being charged banquet prices for a corned beef and
cabbage dinner.
When it comes to spiritual values, however, we lose all sense of
proportion. We become spendthrifts, who throw our priceless treasures
away, and we literally sell our birthrights for a mess of pottage. One
thinks of this particularly just now when one watches so many young
persons making such bad and losing bargains with fate. There are the
boys scarcely out of their teens who think it is such a sporting thing,
so dashing, and that it shows that they are such men of the world to
carry flasks on their hips and drink the vile poison that bootleggers
sell. For the sake of the kick they get out of this and for a few
minutes’ exhilaration, they are risking not only death itself, but what
is far, far worse, blindness and imbecility and every sort of nervous
ailment.
Look at the pasty-faced, blear-eyed youths with shaking hands that you
see all about you, their minds dulled, their energies paralyzed, their
ambitions killed by drink; who are done with life before they have ever
begun to live. What a price they have paid for booze! Can any boy look
at a drunken sot, dirty, poor, despised, and think that the pleasure
that he has got out of drink has paid for what it cost him?
And the girls. The girls who are mad for gaiety, crazy for the
admiration of men; the girls who go on drinking parties, who indulge
in petting parties, who joy-ride until all hours of the night, who let
men kiss and fondle them because that is the price that men demand
for taking them out. How cheaply they sell themselves! Many a girl
pays with shame and disgrace that follow her to the longest day she
lives for a single wild party. They buy their fun high, these girls
who exchange for it their self-respect, their modesty, their maidenly
innocence and their good names.
The family quarrel. That is a domestic luxury for which we have to
pay so dearly that it is never worth the cost. Undoubtedly, when one
is feeling cross, and irritable, and disgruntled, there is a certain
luxury in letting go all of one’s self-control, and turning one’s
temper loose, and stabbing right and left with cruel words that wound
like dagger thrusts. Also it salves one’s own conscience to lay the
blame for everything that goes wrong on some one else. Therefore, many
husbands and wives go on a daily orgy of nerves and temper. They vent
their spleen against life on each other. They say to each other all the
mean and hateful things that they are too politic to say to strangers.
But the price they pay! It bankrupts them. For they kill each other’s
love. They slay each other’s respect. They inevitably come to hate each
other and to cherish secret grudges, born of insult and injustice.
There is no peace nor tenderness in their homes and their marriages
either end in divorce or become long drawn out misery. What a price to
pay for the lack of a little self-control!
Extravagance. The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the
things that you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old
age. The woman who cannot resist pretty clothes. The woman who is
bitten by the society bug and who tries to keep up with people better
off than she is. The man who belongs to lodges, when he can’t pay the
rent collector. The man who buys an automobile and a radio on the
instalment plan. They will pay, as sure as fate, for gratifying the
desire of the moment by long years of bitter dependence. Twenty or
thirty years from now they will be down and out, and they will either
be in almshouses or the hangers on of relatives, who resent having to
take care of Poor Uncle John or Cousin Susan. Or they will be burdens
on their children, who are having all they can do to take care of their
own families.
The highest priced cars in the world are not the gold-plated,
satin-lined jewel boxes made for millionaires. They are the cheap
little cars bought by the people who cannot afford them and who have to
go into debt for them.
And there is the price the lazy pay for shiftlessness. And the price
the mother pays who lets her children roam the streets while she plays
bridge or goes to clubs. And the price the sarcastic pay who alienate
a friend for the sake of making a witty speech. There are a thousand
other little gratifications of a mood or inclination, the desire of a
moment, that we pay for with tears, with loneliness, with failure, with
our very heart’s blood. What a pity we don’t count the cost of things
before we indulge ourselves in them!
LIV
THE IDEAL MOTHER
A woman asks: “What qualities should the ideal mother possess?”
To begin with, a mother should have love, and tenderness, and sympathy,
and be willing to sacrifice herself for her children. These are the
stock virtues of motherhood, and virtually all mothers possess them.
But they alone do not make a woman a good mother. Often they do as
much harm as good, for you can ruin a child by blind devotion. You
can enfeeble it by too much tenderness. You can make it a selfish
egotist and an overbearing brute by making yourself a doormat for it
to walk over. So to love, tenderness, sympathy and unselfishness the
ideal mother must add other qualities, and the most important of these
is the ability to see her job as a whole and to realize that she is
responsible for the finished goods that she turns out.
Not many mothers have this vision; or, rather, they shut their eyes
and refuse to see that the molding of their children’s characters,
the settling of their destinies, is in their own hands. They let a
high-tempered child grow up undisciplined and without teaching it any
self-control. They let a slothful, lazy one grow up without forming
habits of industry. They never teach a self-indulgent, greedy child to
curb its appetite. They spoil and pamper their children, and then they
say that they “hope” their children will turn out all right!
The ideal mother knows that you form children’s characters in the
cradle, and so she does not trust to luck with her youngsters. She
begins when they are babies to teach them self-control, and thrift,
and industry, and all the principles of right living. The ideal mother
must have a backbone. Unfortunately, most mothers permit their hearts
to crowd out their spinal column until they have no more backbone than
a fishing worm. This is why you hear women say despairingly that they
can’t do a thing with their 10-year-old child.
It takes nerve, and grit, and determination, and courage to fight
self-willed youngsters, and mother is too soft to do it. So she gives
in rather than listen to her baby’s howls of rage or go through the
struggle of conquering a disobedient child. And the inevitable result
is that her children have a contempt for her as a weakling, and ride
roughshod over her, and become the outbreaking young hoodlums who fill
our jails and brothels.
The ideal mother is a human being. She doesn’t pose before her children
as a plaster saint or an oracle on a pedestal. One of the reasons why
children do not confide in their parents is because the average father
and mother pretend that they were such models of all the virtues when
they were young that their children feel they have nothing in common
with them and that they wouldn’t understand how a boy or girl feels who
wants to do all sorts of foolish things.
How can a girl tell her mother that a boy kissed her, if mother
represents herself as Miss Prunes and Prisms, and says that when _she_
was young girls never skylarked, and never went on joy-rides or to
cabarets, or held hands in the movies, but spent a pleasant evening
sitting up in the parlor in the presence of their elders discussing
improving topics?
It is the human mothers who can sympathize with their children’s desire
for good times and help them to them; who will stretch a point to get
a girl a new frock or a boy the fraternity pin he craves, who get well
enough acquainted with their children to really help them and guard
them.
The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her
ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults
and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line
on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make
the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant
but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he
undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him.
She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some
occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which
the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is
intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so
she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for
herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of
proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging
about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with
endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are,
and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the
admiration of all beholders.
Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable
her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes
and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails
young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you
will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible,
pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for
prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in
despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well
grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old
woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once
gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when
they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.”
That is the whole of the law and the prophets.
LV
HOW TO CATCH A WIFE
“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man.
“Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”
Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to
their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband
than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more
inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of
a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her
tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go
after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and
applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray
hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it
from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about
the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker
after knowledge on this subject I would say:
First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she
belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more
rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait.
There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and
battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women
whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it
in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who
fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success
will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and
upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great
unsatisfied need of her soul.
If the girl is of the clear-eyed, upstanding, competent business
type, your best method of winning her is by the good, old, well-tried
Platonic friendship method. She isn’t anxious to exchange a mahogany
desk for a kitchen range nor to give up a good pay envelope and an easy
job to toil for some man for nothing. Likewise, she has worked with men
too long for her to see any rosy halo around the masculine brow, so
she is pretty apt to shy off at any suggestion of marriage and balk at
the thought of the altar. But life lacks savor to every woman without
masculine society, and so this particular type of woman is especially
allured by the idea of a beautiful and satisfying friendship with some
man. And when a chap has got his toe that far into the door to a
woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not open it all the way.
Only there is this word of warning: Never pop the question to the
business girl in the morning of a sunshiny day when she has on a new
frock and a good hat and everything is going swimmingly at the office
and she feels fit and fine and ready to buck the world. Instead, choose
a rainy evening, when she is sitting alone at home, dejected and
forlorn, when she is tired and the boss has been grumpy. Then the thing
she wants most on earth is just a nice, strong masculine shoulder to
cry on.
If the girl you want is a flapper, your best ally is your bankbook. All
you need to look good to her is to be a good spender and a fast worker.
Hold not your hand and count not the cost of jewelry and trinketry and
candy and flowers and cabarets and eats and joy-rides, and remember
that the man with the longest purse wins. Some day she will jazz with
you to the preacher, and you will live scrappily ever afterward.
If the girl upon whom your affections are set is a demure little
Puritan, make her your Mother Confessor. Confide to her all your sins,
real and imaginary. Invent a dark past for her benefit. Make her
believe that but for her Sacred Influence you would become an abandoned
character and that she alone can lead you up to the higher life. All
women have the reformation complex, and the better they are and the
less they know of the world the harder they fall for the belief that a
grown man’s character is like a piece of dough that they can mold into
any shape they please. Once let a girl get the idea into her head that
she is responsible for your soul, and she is yours for the taking.
If the girl you want is one that you made mud pies with in childhood
and went to school with, and who refuses to see you in a sentimental
light, don’t be discouraged by her telling you that she will be a
sister to you. Just keep right on strutting your Rachel-and-Jacob
stuff. Mighty few women can resist that. Make yourself a habit with the
girl. Make yourself necessary to her happiness and comfort by always
paying her the little attentions that women like. Fetch and carry for
her. Be the one person in the world she can always depend upon to make
life pleasant and agreeable for her.
Then suddenly drop her cold. Begin paying furious attentions to some
woman she always accuses of being made up and older than she looks and
an artful hussy, and it is a hundred-to-one bet that she will call you
back and let you see that her feelings toward you were not at all what
she had supposed they were. For when she thinks you are about to marry
another woman she will wake up to the fact that life will be cinders,
ashes and dust without you.
If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who hangs between “I
will” and “I won’t,” who is always vivisecting her heart and taking
her emotional temperature, what you need to use is caveman methods.
She is just dying to have you drag her to the altar by the hair of her
head, and if you are half a man you will do it. Don’t ever ask that
kind of a woman to marry you. Tell her you are going to marry her and
that you have the license and the ring in your pocket and are on the
way to the chapel with her, and you will give her a thrill that will
last a lifetime.
These are only a few of the many ways to win a wife. It is dead easy,
and any man can do it who has gumption enough to work out a cross-word
puzzle.
LVI
DANGEROUS GIRLS
Chief among the women from whom a young man should pray his guardian
angel to deliver him is the Hinting Girl. She is a gentle grafter who
holds up every man she meets with a pair of innocent-looking blue eyes
that bid him stand and deliver just as effectually and efficiently as
if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of blue-nosed revolvers
in the hands of a highway robber. You will find these cheerful
workers, son, where you least expect them. The very highest society is
filled with girls of undisputed position and unquestioned morals, who
ruthlessly plunder every man they meet, and you will never encounter an
individual more to be feared than these bandits of the parlor.
Did you ever wonder why one girl receives so many more presents than
another, and why every man who passes lays some offering on her shrine?
Take it from me, this is the result of science and not mere chance.
Observe, closely, and you will see, when you call, that she steers the
conversation artfully around to the latest play, and before you know it
you have offered to take her to it.
Also, she has let you know that violets are her favorite flower, and
the date of her birthday. Before Christmas she artlessly confides
in you where there is the jeweled vanity, or the hand-painted fan,
that she has set her heart upon, and she couldn’t shout it at you any
plainer if she bawled it to you through a megaphone that she expects
you to come across, and will think you a piker if you don’t.
Beware the Hinting Girl, son. She is the woman who is accessory before
the crime of half of the embezzlements of trusted clerks who go wrong,
and who, if she got her deserts, would stand in the prisoners’ dock
by the side of the poor, weak, trembling boy who has stolen to buy
her jewels or to give her a good time. And she makes the sort of wife
whose husband rises up and sits down to a never-ending chant of “Gimme!
Gimme! Gimme!”
Then there’s the Girl With a Past. Very often she has been more sinned
against than sinning. Probably her morals are just as good as your
own, son; but, even so, such marriages rarely turn out happily. For we
have to face the naked fact that, while a man may love a woman well
enough to forget and forgive her indiscretions, society, which is not
in love with her, remembers them all. And it reminds her husband that
it recalls them. The man who marries a Woman With a Past is pretty
much in the same fix as the man who hires a reformed embezzler to be
his cashier. He hopes he will run straight, but he keeps an eye on
the cash box—a situation which doesn’t make for domestic felicity. Of
course, there are women who reform and gather in their wild oats crops
and ever after raise nothing but garden truck around their doorstep,
but even while their husbands are devouring their domestic cabbages
and onions there rarely comes a family spat in which they do not throw
in their wives’ teeth the kind of farmers they have been. The truth
is that it takes a big man and woman to defy the conventions. That is
what makes it safest for those of us who are little people to play the
game according to the rules laid down by Hoyle. And one of these rules
is that women must keep their skirts clean. By and large it is a good
rule, son, for it means the purity of race, the integrity of society
and a lot of other things that keep this old world going.
Then there’s the Weeping Girl. Whenever you meet with a gentle,
sweet, soft, babyish-looking little girl, with a chin that trembles
and big eyes that overflow with tears at the slightest provocation,
and who can cry without her nose getting red, fly, son, fly. She will
fasten herself upon you, and when you try to make a getaway she will
cling to you and weep. And no man can behold unmoved a woman crying
for him, because he is such a good thing. You will stop to wipe her
eyes; and all will be over with you except the long, long years of
rainy matrimony when you will have to deal with a wife who cannot be
reasoned with or cajoled or coerced into doing anything she doesn’t
want to do, because you will be so afraid of starting another freshet
of tears.
Then there’s the Domestic Girl, who baits her hook with angels’ food.
You might go farther and do worse than marry the Domestic Girl, for
while romance is transient one’s appetite remains, and after one’s
illusions are gone it is a comfortable thing to have a good dinner to
fall back upon. Still, one must confess, the Domestic Girl is apt to
have only a bread-and-butter conversation, of which a man might tire
in time; so, unless your stomach is developed in excess of your heart,
walk warily when the Domestic Girl begins to inveigle you into little
meals for two that she cooks for you under a pink-shaded lamp.
Lastly, there is the girl who is just near you—the girl you work with,
or who lives in the same boarding house with you, or who comes to visit
your sister. Men who have escaped the dangers of all other women are
the victims of propinquity which unites them to ladies they couldn’t
otherwise have seen through a telescope. Somehow our very nearness to
the people with whom we are thrown every day keeps us from getting a
perspective on their faults and disabilities, and habit deceives us
into thinking that they are more necessary to us than they are. And so
we drift into the mismated marriages that keep the divorce courts busy
and the world salted down with the brine of our tears.
Therefore, if you perceive that Mamie, whom you thought vulgar at
first, no longer gets on your nerves; if you observe that Sadie, who
bored you when you first met her, is beginning to interest you with her
chatter about what “he said” and “I said,” and you discover that you
have quit being shocked by Carrie’s gum-chewing and Mabel’s grammar,
then, son, pack your trunk and leave while the leaving is good.
Otherwise, the Girl Next to You will get you sure.
But why amplify the list? Some day a girl will tag you, and you will
know you are “it,” and a million warnings could not save you from your
fate.
LVII
WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN
A youth asks me how he can tell whether a girl loves him or not. Well,
son, you can’t always tell. There are times when all signs fail, and
there is no man so clever, so discerning, so sophisticated that a
woman cannot fool him if she set her mind to doing so. For the many
generations in which women were entirely subservient to men, and in
which they had to get everything they had out of men, and in which
all their pleasures and perquisites depended on their wheedling and
cajoling men, have made them gifted liars and adept at befooling men.
However, the modern girl, being able to make her own living, and stand
upon her own feet, and therefore being to a large degree independent of
men, has less need to simulate emotions which she does not feel, and
so she has lost the fine technique of her mother and her grandmother
and her great-great-great grandmother. Flirting has become a lost
art, and the methods of the gold-digger are so crude and raw that any
man who is taken in by one deserves all he gets. The average girl is
almost brutally frank about the state of her feelings. She hasn’t even
subtlety enough about her to keep a man guessing.
But there is, of course, a sort of no-man’s land that lies between
liking and loving in which the girl wanders, herself as uncertain and
bewildered as you are. And, I take it, it is across this dangerous
terrain that you wish to be guided. Sally is dear and sweet to you.
She apparently enjoys your society, and you never have any trouble in
making dates with her. She is the best little pal ever. But what you
want to know is whether she cares for you just as she does for half a
dozen other chaps, or whether you are the ONLY ONE.
First, Is she willing to sit at home of an evening with you or not?
If she comes down with her hat on to receive you, or if she always
wants to step out somewhere, you have not touched her heart. She
regards you merely as a purveyor of good times, a theater ticket and
a dancing partner, and any other youth who had the price would do as
well. But things have got serious with her when she proposes to spend
the evening at home under a pink-shaded lamp. That shows that she has
begun to live a romance with more thrills to it than anything she can
see depicted on the stage, and that she thinks that Valentino is a poor
dub at love-making compared to you. Also it indicates that she desires
to isolate you, to cut you out from the herd and put her brand upon
you. Cupid is essentially a monopolist. Especially the Lady Cupid. The
first thing that a woman does when she falls in love with a man is to
try to shut him away from all other women. So long as a girl wants to
go in crowds there is nothing doing with her in the love line. If she
really cares for you, she will maneuver to get you off to herself.
Next. Observe how a girl treats your pocketbook. If she gets everything
out of you that she can; if, when you go out, she has to have a taxi
to convey her three blocks, although she can walk ten miles around a
department store without turning a hair; if she always suggests orchids
when flowers are mentioned, and invariably picks out the most expensive
places to dance and the highest-priced dishes on the menu, you may be
certain that she has no serious intentions concerning you. You are
merely the good thing that a merciful Providence has brought forward
for her sustenance. But when a girl begins to talk economy to a boy;
when she suggests going to the movies instead of to the theatre; when
she orders a ham sandwich instead of a chicken breast and mushrooms
under glass, it is an unmistakable sign that she is regarding his
bankroll as her own and is commencing to save up for furniture for her
future home.
Next—and this is an acid test—talk to the girl about yourself and
observe her reaction to it. Monologue along to her by the hour about
what you are doing, about what you have done in the past and what you
expect to do in the future. Tell her all about what you said to the
boss and what the boss said to you. Explain to her all the details of
the grocery business. Regale her with reminiscences of your childhood,
when you were a fat little boy with green freckles on your hands.
If she yawns in your face or if she listens with the expression of a
martyr being nailed to the cross; if she gets up and walks around the
room or turns on the radio or interrupts you to ask what you think
of the President’s foreign policy, you may as well abandon hope. Her
affection is merely gold plated, not the real thing. But if she laps up
your talk about yourself and asks for more; if she begs you to repeat
that darling story of how naughty you were to your nurse, and if she
sits, goggle-eyed with excitement, on the edge of her chair while you
relate how you sold a bill of goods to a hard customer, rest assured
that her heart is yours for keeps. For there are only two women in the
world, a man’s mother and the woman who is his wife or hopes to be his
wife, who want to hear him talk about himself.
Take note also of a girl’s attitude toward you. As long as she regards
you as an intelligent, husky, able-bodied man, capable of taking care
of yourself and with sense enough to come in out of the rain, her
regard for you is merely platonic. But when a girl suddenly becomes
anxious about the state of your health, when she worries over your
getting your feet wet and is afraid you are not getting enough
vitamines in your diet, when she warns you not to forget to put on your
overcoat if it is cold and to look out for automobiles when you cross
the street, then it is safe to begin pricing engagement rings.
Of course, there are other signs of love, such as a girl developing an
acute attack of domesticity and passing up the display of French frocks
in a window for that of aluminum pots and pans, and especially when she
begins dragging a man to church with her, which are not to be ignored.
But when a maiden begins to mother a chap and indicates that her idea
of spending a perfectly hilarious evening is just to be alone with him,
listening to him talk about himself, she is his for the taking.
LVIII
MARRIAGE LESSONS
What has marriage taught you?
“The chief thing that marriage has taught me,” said a man who has
had forty years of experience in matrimony, “is that women are human
beings. When a man acquires that piece of information it always gives
him a bit of a jolt, for most men never really think of women as
human beings at all. They think, according to their kind, of women
as angels, above all earthly passions, with no nerves or tempers, or
selfish cravings for pleasure and who find their joy in life in loving
the unlovable and forgiving the unforgivable and being a sweet, gooey,
sticky mass of gentleness and patience and unselfishness. Or they think
of women as being baby dolls to be dressed up and played with and put
on the shelf when they are tired of them. Or they think of women as
pieces of household machinery—sort of automatic, self-starting cooks
and carpet sweepers and washers and menders, who run on their own power
and who don’t even have to be oiled up with a few lubricating words of
praise now and then.
“And so husbands treat their wives according to their conception of
what women are, and that is why marriage is so often a failure and why
there are so many divorces. Women don’t want to be regarded either
as saints or toys or domestic conveniences. They want to be treated
as human beings and have their husbands give them the same sort of a
square deal a man gives his business partner.
“About nine-tenths of the spats that married people have are over
money. It gets on the husband’s nerves to have the woman eternally
dunning him for money. It seems to him that before he gets his hat
off in the evening she begins asking for a few dollars for this and
for that. Then the bills come in, and they are always bigger than he
expected, and he rows about it, and she thinks that he is stingy.
“The trouble is that the man isn’t treating his wife like a rational
human being. He is expecting her to be a miracle worker and run a house
on air. He is humiliating her and making her feel that he is a tyrant
by making her come like a beggar to him for every penny because he
has got an idea that women don’t mind panhandling. Furthermore, he is
expecting her to gauge her expenditures wisely, when she hasn’t the
faintest idea of what her resources are.
“I have found out that it saves friction over money to make my wife
as liberal an allowance as I can. I have found out that if you will
explain to a woman just exactly how the financial situation stands
in the family and why you can’t afford the thing she wants she will
not only do without it gladly but cut down her expenses in other ways
and help you to save. It is believing that their husbands are holding
out on them and not splitting fifty-fifty with them that makes women
reckless spenders.
“And I have found that a man is a fool who lies to his wife. In the
end she always catches up with him, and then she imagines things ten
times worse than they were. If a man telephones his wife that he is
going to stay downtown and meet a customer from Oshkosh and she learns
that he really played poker with the boys she pictures a scene of wild
debauchery and leaps to the conclusion that he is leading the double
life and he never hears the last of it. But if he tells her just what
he is going to do she is so flattered at being trusted and thought
broadminded enough not to begrudge her husband an evening’s pleasure
that she goes to bed and goes to sleep instead of waiting up for him
with a curtain lecture sizzling in her mind.
“Marriage has taught me that women think more of words than they do of
deeds and that a woman would rather have her husband tell her that he
loves her than to have him work his fingers to the bone for her and
never make her a soft speech. As long as a husband tells his wife how
beautiful she is and how he would like to deck her out in diamonds
and sables she is perfectly content to do without them and wear
hand-me-downs. It is only when she thinks that he doesn’t care whether
she has fine clothes or not that she gets peevish over not having the
finery that other women have.
“Marriage has taught me that in the family circle the hammer is a
boomerang that returns and annihilates the hammerer. If you knock your
wife’s cooking she says, ‘What’s the use of trying to please you?’ and
makes no effort to improve; but if you praise her dinners she breaks
her neck trying to make them better and better. If you criticize the
size of the bills she revenges herself by buying something that really
cost money; but if you tell her what a help she is to you and what a
marvelous manager, she becomes a nickel-nurser.
“If you find fault with her hat or her dress, you have to buy her a new
one; but if you tell her how becoming her last year’s costume is and
how it brings out her lines, she will wear it into shreds. Marriage
has taught me that if you let your wife know that you admire her and
appreciate her, that you are grateful to her for all that she does for
you and that you try to do all in your power to make her happy, she
will repay you a thousandfold and there is nothing she won’t do for you
and no fault she won’t overlook in you.”
LIX
THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN
The other day a man killed his beautiful young wife because she was a
better “business man” than he was and made more money. The woman loved
her husband and was good to him. She was ambitious for him. She got
him a job with the people for whom she worked and tried to push him
along and help him in every way. But it simply was not in him to be the
go-getter that she was. She was a success and he was a failure. And in
the frenzy of morbid jealousy that this engendered in him, he slew her.
Thus vividly do we have brought to our attention one of the new
difficulties that the advent of women into the business world has
injected into the already complicated matrimonial proposition. It
makes the question of how the modern wife can best be a helpmeet to
her husband one that takes a Solomon in petticoats to answer. In olden
times the matter was perfectly simple. The woman who wanted to help
her husband along had only to be a good and thrifty manager, to pare
the potatoes thin enough and squeeze the nickels. She did her part in
building up the family fortunes by saving. But, in many cases to-day,
the old woman’s granddaughter is a crackerjack business woman who
sees that she can help her husband more by earning than by scrimping,
and that she can make more money in one year in business than she
could save in ten years by doing her own housework and wearing shabby
clothes. So, as long as she is working for their common good, the woman
cannot understand why her husband shouldn’t be just as willing for her
to help him by working in an office as in a kitchen, or why the wife
who does brain labor isn’t as good a wife as the one who does manual
labor.
But the great majority of women who continue to follow any gainful
pursuit after marriage find out that, while there is a new woman who
looks at everything in life from a new angle, there is no new man.
Women have changed in their relationship to man, but men stand pat just
where Adam did when it comes to dealing with women.
If you will notice, it is only women who prate about equality between
the sexes. Men take no stock in any such heresy. When a man tells a
woman that she is an angel and that he looks up to her and worships
her, it is one of the lover’s perjuries at which Jove laughs. In
reality he doesn’t mean a word of it. The very basic thing on which a
man’s love for a woman is built is his sense of superiority to her.
He wants to feel stronger than she is, wiser than she is, to be more
successful than she is. She must look up to him, revere him, ask his
opinion, be guided by his advice.
That is why the clinging-vine type of woman is so appealing to men,
and it is why intelligent, big-brained men so often marry morons and
are happy and contented with them. Their silly little wives do not
understand one word in five they say and are no companions to them, but
they satisfy the masculine demand to dominate the woman. When the case
is reversed, as it often is, and when the wife is the more intelligent,
the stronger character—when the gray mare is the better horse and
pulls most of the load—the marriage is invariably unhappy, and the
husband almost invariably either openly or secretly hates his wife.
His love for her is never strong enough to survive the hurt to his
vanity. His sense of inferiority to her keeps his nerves raw, and if
he is dependent upon her it turns his very soul to wormwood and gall.
I have never known a woman who supported her husband who received any
gratitude for it. He would eat her bread, but he did it as a snapping
dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
There is nothing that fills a woman’s cup of happiness so full and
overflowing as for her husband to achieve a notable success and be
great and famous. She glories in being Mrs. Explorer or Mrs. Engineer
or Mrs. Banker or Mrs. Author, and loves to shine in the reflected
glory. But the deadliest insult you can offer any man is to speak
of him as his wife’s husband and call him Mr. Mary Smith, although
Mary may have written the book of the year or have performed some
achievement that has made the world sit up and take notice of her.
Perhaps all of this is natural. Perhaps this cosmic urge that the male
has to dominate the female is something instinctive for which he is not
responsible.
But it makes the woman’s course a hard one to steer, for, curiously
enough, the weak man is often attracted to the strong woman, and there
is something maternal in the strong woman that wants to mother the weak
man and makes her feel that he only needs her to take care of him and
boost him and show him the way to success.
So the girl who is making a big salary marries the man who is making a
small one, and she tries to supply for him the business sense he lacks
and to galvanize him into a hustle of which he is incapable, and they
live scrappily ever afterward. Yet there is nothing we can do about
it as long as nature goes blundering along putting the brains and
talents of merchants and bankers and trust presidents into a lot of
women’s heads and making plenty of men who would have been wonderful
housekeepers and done perfectly lovely embroidery work if only they
hadn’t got the wrong sex.
LX
NEW IDEALS FOR OLD
The strangest thing in this age of strange things is the new
relationship that is growing up between the sexes. So many of the
ideals that have ruled us for centuries have been scrapped and swept
into the discard that the boy and girl babies of to-day are virtually
born into a new world where few of the conventions that ruled their
parents survive. Take the matter of financial independence, for
instance. Since the caveman days it has been held that the proper
attitude of woman was one of dependence on her lord and master. The
woman bore the children and kept the house, and the husband provided
the wherewithal to support the family. When a woman had property her
husband took possession of it on the day they were married. Virtually
every lucrative occupation was barred to women. When a man and a woman
went to any place of amusement the man would have been highly insulted
if she had offered to pay any part of the cost of the entertainment.
Man was the purse bearer, and his lordly gesture indicated that he had
the checking account of Mr. Rockefeller and that woman was a dear
little sweetie who was not to bother her poor little foolish head over
the cost of anything.
To-day the majority of women earn their living before they are married.
Financial independence has become so necessary to their happiness that
one of the potent sources of domestic discord is the inability of the
woman who has had her own pay envelope to do without it and reconcile
herself to taking whatever her husband gives her as recompense for her
hard work as a poor man’s wife. Also husbands are coming more and more
to begrudge spending money on their wives and are demanding oftener
and oftener that the wage-earning girls they marry shall keep on with
their jobs. Likewise, it is a common thing for the young women who go
out with young men to places of amusement to pay their own way and go
fifty-fifty on all expenses.
This may be fair enough. Certainly, when men and women work side by
side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more
reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she
should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for
and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her
victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward
woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her
own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense
of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to
have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They
treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the
occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all
that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more
and more evident that men are less willing to support their families
and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be
wage-earners even after they are married.
Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty.
In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he
demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the
shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are
few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all
been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would
have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes
tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear
them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry
who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than
their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual
conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous
and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no
attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically
admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to
spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope
to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is
obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of
modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both
sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of
humanity.
Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back
of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought
that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment,
and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what
the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always
fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often
a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a
success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are
husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have
kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and
women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority
of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each
other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can
tell.
LXI
WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON
When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of
incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial
a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports
who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their
bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit,
infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the
wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a
divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and
hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no
pity for them.
Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in
the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as
incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a
man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that
they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there
any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily
contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who
gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a
perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big
fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big
sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the
little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions
are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the
difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get
married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that
divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.
Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at
everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every
situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different
race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been
brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought.
Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods
and at different altars and eat different dishes.
What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of
incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have
the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic
thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and
wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable,
or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is
perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They
can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought
up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a
dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable
feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn
in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make
a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.
On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make
a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen
shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high
crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband
who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from
mussing up the best sofa cushion.
There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the
coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted,
demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made
over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their
mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because
they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed
temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then
there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in
restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who
has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What
superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging
him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all
frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!
Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits
and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that
the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot
bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars
are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the
use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for
one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have
to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the
partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating
neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that
one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of
old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the
disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to
breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he
is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.
These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to
observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred
to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in
habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is
at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it
is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder
is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do
adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and
harmony.
LXII
THE CHILDREN PAY
No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many
husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they
quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which
they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous
to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other,
and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he
or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a
scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way
of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are
running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s
happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers
in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of
stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones
they love and who love them.
It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so
many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare
goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many
a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to
say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an
acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along
with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other
persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others.
They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and
taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their
tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are
tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever
have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold
his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as
many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other
persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to
another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she
were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and
if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.
Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both
men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t
a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a
few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her
a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she
can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond
to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know
perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately
and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is
obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun
in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug
our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to
take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting
each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent
diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it
end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and
goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her
daily tasks.
The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they
who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves,
with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed
characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets
almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of
bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers
and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their
children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that
nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of
divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together.
Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known
an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married
parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.
Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin
the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t
just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up
the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You
think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean
half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit
than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the
children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning
to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions
shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with
no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you
may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them
from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a
breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.
Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling?
And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle
your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world
and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself
the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all
the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that
you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along
with other persons.
LXIII
THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING
No complaint is more general—possibly no belief is more prevalent among
women—than that a woman of intelligence wastes her energies and her
abilities in being merely a housekeeper. Following the domestic arts is
a despised calling, held in such contempt by the majority of women that
they never take the trouble to achieve success in it; and yet there is
no other occupation under the sun that requires so many and such varied
talents as does the learned profession of home-making. Did you ever
think what a woman must be in order to create and carry on a happy and
prosperous home?
She must be a financier. There can be no peace and pleasure in a
home where the wolf is always howling under the window and the bill
collector hammering on the door. There are, of course, a few men in
every community who are such gifted money-makers that they can annex
more coin than any woman can spend, but for the great mass of ordinary,
industrious, hard-working humanity the wife settles the financial
status of the family. It is her ability to handle money, her knowledge
of where to spend and where to economize, her knack of making a dollar
buy a hundred and five cents’ worth and get a blue trading stamp thrown
in to boot, that is at the foundation of every prosperous home. We
don’t hear anything about it, because the woman doesn’t know herself
how awfully clever she is, but the majority of women in this country
are doing marvels of financiering in the way they make both ends meet
in their housekeeping allowance, and keep up appearances, that entitle
them to qualify in the Rockefeller class.
She must be a general.
She must know how to command. She must know how to set all the
multitudinous wheels of household machinery in motion and be able
to keep them moving without friction. She must be able to enforce
obedience, inspire enthusiasm, plan campaigns, forestall her enemy, be
fertile in expedient and subtle in strategy. Any woman who maintains a
comfortable and well-ordered home, the kind of a house that we like to
visit, and who raises a nice family and marries her daughters off well
could give the commander-in-chief of the army points on generalship.
She must be a diplomat. The husband question, the children question and
the servant question are not to be handled without gloves. There is no
hour of the day that she is not called upon to deal with some problem
that requires the finesse of a Talleyrand. She must be able, if the
white-winged dove of peace is to brood over the home nest, to deal
with her husband’s prejudices and circumvent them so delicately that
he will never know that he is being induced to do the thing that he
swore he would never, never do. She must assert her authority over the
growing boy with such cunning that he does not perceive that her fine
Italian hand is on the check rein holding him tight and steady. She
must be able, without the girls dreaming that she does it, to insinuate
a doubt, drop a word of ridicule, imply an impossibility that will keep
her daughters out of entangling alliances and steer them toward the
reciprocally profitable permanent treaties they should make.
Above all, she must be able to see most when she is apparently stone
blind; hear everything when she seems to be as deaf as the adder of the
Scriptures; to be most on guard when she looks to be sleeping at her
post, and to be most chaperoning her daughters when the onlooker and
the girls themselves would swear that she was most giving them their
liberty.
She must know how to tread very softly if she keeps off the corns of
her servants, for whether a woman is agreeable or disagreeable in the
home her children are bound to stay there with her, but it is the
blessed privilege of Mary Ann and Bridget and eke of Hulda and Dinah
that they can pack their trunks and go. Only the very quintessence
of diplomacy renders a mistress _persona grata_ to the kitchen, and
the woman who preserves friendly relations with that must understand
the Alpha and Omega of how to make a jolly cover the discipline of a
martinet. Any woman who, when she is fifty years old, has a husband who
thinks her a Solomon in petticoats, grown children who quote mother’s
opinion, and a cook who has been with her five years is fitted to be
Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of
St. James’s, and nothing but the stupidity of a nation that believes
that breeches and brains are synonymous terms keeps her out of the job.
She must be an artist.
It is the woman’s province to create the beauty of the home. This is
true whether it is the palace of the millionaire or the three-room flat
of the day laborer. Every room that she arranges is a picture, just as
much as if she painted a Dutch interior on canvas.
She must be a poet.
A home is not merely a place of shelter and food—it is a thing no less
of the spirit and soul—and a woman must put into it the passion of her
heart and the joy of creating just as truly as a poet must put them
into his song. To make a home that is beautiful, that breathes the
spirit of home, that is a haven of peace and rest to those who live in
it and that is a glimpse of Paradise to the stranger who is bidden
within its gates is a profession the most exacting in which any woman
can engage and the one that calls for the greatest number of talents.
Also it is the most profitable, for within it are made the men and
women who go forth to bless the world. And the wonder of wonders is
that so many just plain ordinary women are doing it, and the greatest
marvel of all is that they do not realize what a glorious thing they
are doing!
LXIV
A FATHER’S INFLUENCE
There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted
view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it,
poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly
come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children
and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers
seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good
for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat
and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated
with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s
Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and
it comes around so often.
No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all
powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid
or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to
do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He
dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his
conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which
in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s
influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no
miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded
woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make
a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool
woman wise.
Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment
about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s
immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without
vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their
own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s
lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their
standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall
attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they
associate.
Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and
unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak,
incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too
well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and
of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly
subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good,
especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them
how fallacious such a belief is.
A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her
daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just
the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her
hands.
It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up
their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path.
But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence
upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their
own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and
example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their
very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that
wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are
the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy
on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their
extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what
a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one
who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting
married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse
yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he
can lump it.”
When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man can be so afflicted
without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to
their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence
to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it,
children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their
fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows
intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than
the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and
does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the
things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows
the rules and how to play the game.
Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s
characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his
slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a
veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand
in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and
a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally
recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a
girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs
to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her
contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must
have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead
of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a
divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up,
kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a
good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in
her.
A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by
father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.
LXV
THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN
The bitterest cry of poor people is that they have nothing to give
their children. The fathers and mothers who cannot buy imported finery
for their girls or sports-model cars for their boys and send them off
to expensive colleges and fill their pockets with money feel that they
have come empty-handed to their children and have nothing to give them.
Yet the poorest man and woman who bend above a cradle have it in their
power to bestow upon their babe treasures so great that their worth
cannot be computed in dollars and cents, and that will bring the child
more pleasure and happiness in life than they could purchase with all
the wealth of the Rothschilds. For there is no price tag on the most
precious things in the world. They are equally free to prince and
pauper, and more often the beggar gets them than the millionaire does.
For example, there is love—a close, intimate, personal association—and
tenderness and understanding. Poor parents can more easily give to
their children than the wealthy can. And the child that has them is
rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and the child that has them not
is poverty-stricken, although it has all else besides. The mother who
rocks her baby to sleep on her breast, whose tender arms are always
outstretched to gather her youngsters to her heart, who is never too
tired or too busy to listen to childish confidences, who surrounds
her little ones with a brooding atmosphere of affection,—gives to her
children far more than does the rich mother who gives her children
nurses and governesses and pony carts and fine clothes and costly
playthings but who does not give them herself; who bestows on them
everything but the things that a child wants most and needs most—mother
love and tenderness, the real mother touch.
Not long ago a very rich young man figured in a disgraceful scandal,
and the one excuse offered in his defense was that his mother was dead
and his father had never given him anything except money. He had never
had any affection bestowed upon him. He had had no parental guidance.
When a little lad he had been put in a school and kept there without
even being visited by any one who loved him, without even going home
for vacations. He had been just a pitiful little millionaire waif for
whom nobody cared. The lot of such a child is infinitely worse than
that of the one whose parents are in such humble circumstances that
they can give it perhaps only the plainest of food and clothes, but who
do give it a real home that is full of close, warm family life. The
fathers and mothers to whom children are grateful and whose memories
they revere are not those who bequeath them great fortunes, but those
who leave them the memory of a love and understanding that never failed
and of a childhood that was made sweet by their parents’ cherishing.
No matter how poor you are, you can give your children love and
companionship and the privilege of growing up in a peaceful and
cheerful home, and that is something that few rich parents can give
their children.
Another gift that you can make your children is that of teaching them
how to read. When you do that you really don’t need to do much more
for them, because you have put a magic coin in their hands that will
buy them entrance into all the doors of delight and open to them all
of the portals of romance. No one who loves to read can ever be bored
or lonely. He or she has only to open a book, and, presto, he or she
has for company all of the wit and wisdom of the ages. Gay adventures,
beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen beckon, and one has only to
follow them into realms of enchantment. All of interest, all that
informs, that thrills, that amuses, is the property of the reader.
But, reading does not always come by nature, as Dogberry thought it
did. Often it has to be acquired by art, but any child can be taught
to like to read; it can be given the reading habit, and no other gift
can possibly be bestowed upon it that is half so valuable or that will
bring it in such happiness or that will be such an ark of refuge to it
in times of trouble.
Another gift that the poorest parents can make to their children is to
teach them how to see. Most persons go through the world as blind as
bats. They never see anything that isn’t directly under their noses,
and thereby they miss half of the fun and pleasure in living. There
are men and women to whom a sunset is just a phenomenon of nature that
happens every day; to whom a crowd is just a jam of people; who get
nothing out of travel but inconvenience and missing the particular kind
of breakfast food they prefer, and who loathe rain because they get
their feet wet and hate snow because it is messy. And there are other
men and women who see the glory of God in every flaming sunset; who
thrill to the finger tips at the drama they see enacted in every crowd;
to whom travel opens up a new world; to whom every rain is a symphony
and every snowstorm a poem.
Which of these get the most out of life—those who see or those who are
blind; those who can get pleasure out of little things or those who are
too dull and dumb to amuse themselves; those who are sensitive to every
beauty in nature, who appreciate music and art and literature, who get
the last flavor out of good cooking, or those who find everything flat
and stale and uninteresting because they have never been taught to see
the under side of things?
Finally, the poorest parents can teach their children that brave
attitude toward life without which all the balance is cinders, ashes,
and dust. For disappointments and trouble come to us all, and it is
only those who have been taught how to make the best of their bad
bargains, how to laugh at misfortune and mock at fate, who achieve any
real happiness in life. So cheer up, you parents who complain that you
have nothing to give your children. You can give them love. You can
teach them to read and to see things. You can give them a brave heart.
These gifts are worth more than money. And nobody can take them away
from those who have them.
LXVI
A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME
It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize
how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course,
a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper
that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average
man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife
spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it
should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should
have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to
live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across
the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume
to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets
in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man
interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it
runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing
forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it,
fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good
husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.
But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home
and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it
does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who
supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even
a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common
fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps
a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a
thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which
he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess
around as much as he likes.
I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves
in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their
collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not
disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the
place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a
couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their
private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their
wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their
best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So
universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire
house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp
to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention
to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her
husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered
household pet.
Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise
the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will
observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are
perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family
makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are
ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose
mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in
him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and
Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing
to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with
them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to
register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a
month or two.
But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s
relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a
bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask
even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would
fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she
considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and
heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have
his family stay with them as she had to have hers.
As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her
prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her
husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome”
on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces
of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her
husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having
his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with
Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother,
drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they
do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are
always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at
home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an
autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might
like staying in it better.
LXVII
DEVOURING FRIENDS
“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring
friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal
who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself
against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all
the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other
bores and social nuisances.
“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one
who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited
guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through
your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants
to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see
her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient
for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being
translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.
“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because
she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments
with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having
a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she
inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you
have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of
you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because
she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her
calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a
cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it
and goes into action.
“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy
woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have
a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation
in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that
I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s
clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole
schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as
hard.
“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time
Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a
whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s
husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable
time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time
Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about
their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me
up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am
interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and
fruitless conversations about nothing.
“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against
these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me
and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut
my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to
leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over
the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I
am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if
God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his
enemies.
“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your
home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two
evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to
keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We
have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse
every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred
occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.
“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is
regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory _hors
d’œuvre_, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without
the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will
come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real
heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening
with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and
protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone
that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.
“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our
independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake
up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of
liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have
to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their
footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly
on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us
bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our
hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no
way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to
the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household
pests.”
LXVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this
question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then
to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and
husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went
on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my
career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back,
no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in
my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the
brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew
what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all
temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”
Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we
are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are
unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no
clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between
conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find
contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who
are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with
their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work.
You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers,
complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have
missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who
have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness
because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who
lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and
take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold
so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast
numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.
But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the
conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have
leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other
pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some
useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind
and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a
never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in
the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf.
Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.
My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the
bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at
the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are
always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when
they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they
are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they
are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when
the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they
have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and
pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have
formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend
money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire.
Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on
Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.
So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods
provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy
day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty
home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that
are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some
mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace
and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too
old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but
sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder
philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I
want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is
dust and ashes in our teeth.
Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and
great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them,
for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest
competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that
blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest
of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He
suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman
he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children.
The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous
sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk
of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms
around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and
joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to
the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.
Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be
Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to
others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.
LXIX
PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE
What are you storing up for your old age? Are you laying up any money
against the time when you will be old and feeble and no longer able to
work? The hour will strike for you, as it does for others, when your
earning powers will be gone. Your hands will be too stiff and clumsy
to keep on with their accustomed task. Your mind will be too slow to
go the pace in the fierce competition in the commercial world. If you
are an employee, you will lose your job. If you are a business man, you
will find that your trade has somehow drifted away from you. If you are
a professional man, you will be superseded by the new men whose stars
are just rising on the horizon.
Nothing that you can do will alter these conditions. No miracle will
save you from the common fate of all who grow old. But if you have
saved up enough money to make you independent, it will be merely a
matter of mild regret to you. If, however, you have laid up nothing for
the rainy day that is bound to come to you, it will be a tragedy that
you will pray death to end.
For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as
those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old
age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house. Wherever
they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel
themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not
forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from
cruel and callous speeches.
In youth money is a convenience, an aid to pleasure. In age it is
an absolute necessity, for when we are old we have to buy even
consideration and politeness from those about us. This is true even in
the households of our own children, for between the father and mother
who are able to pay their own way and are the source of a never-ending
flow of gifts and treats, and the father and mother who must be
supported is a great gulf fixed. It is the difference between having
the place of honor and the back seat; between being listened to with
respect and having one’s opinions derided; between having one’s little
peculiarities catered to as interesting characteristics and being
snubbed for one’s old-fashioned ways.
Nor is this as unfeeling and hard-boiled as it seems. The average young
couple has all it can do, in these times of the high cost of living, to
provide for itself and the children, and it makes the burden crushing
to have to add the extra weight of the support of the old people of the
families.
The fate of the dependent old is so terrible that it is a marvel that
it does not frighten every one into trying to provide against it. Yet
it was recently stated in a journal of statistics that 80 per cent of
the men and women more than sixty years of age were dependent either
upon their children or upon public charity. Don’t let this misfortune
befall you. Guard against it. Begin systematic saving while you are
young, so that when you are old you will at least have the comfort of
being independent.
Are you laying up affection for your old age? Most of us have a curious
and naïve belief in what we call “natural affection.” We befool
ourselves into thinking that people must love us because they stand in
a certain relationship to us and because there are blood ties between
us. Never was there a more fallacious theory. There is, to be sure,
the mother’s passion for the child she has borne and the instinctive
clinging of the child to its mother while it is young and helpless, but
that is all. It doesn’t follow as a matter of course that grown-up men
and women love their parents just because they are their parents. As a
matter of fact, they don’t, unless the father and mother have won their
love by years of tenderness and understanding and sympathy. You can’t
be hard and tyrannical and selfish and stingy with your children and
expect them to love you because it is their duty to do so. If you want
your children to love you when you are old, you have to begin winning
their hearts when they are in the cradle.
Have you laid up a good supply of friendship for your old age? No
complaint is heard more often from the old than that they are lonely.
Few come to see them. They are seldom asked out. No one sends them
flowers when they are sick. They are neglected and they crave the
little attentions that we all like and yearn for the society of their
fellow creatures. Now, when old people are lonely, it is always their
own fault. It is because they have neglected to lay up any friendships
for the sere and yellow days when they have no longer the power to
attract people to them.
They have gone their selfish way through life, sufficient unto
themselves in their youth. They have never held out a helping hand to
those in need. They have never wept with those who wept and rejoiced
with those who rejoiced. They have not bothered to write notes of
condolence or congratulation. They have never visited the sick and
afflicted. They have never spent an hour listening to an old person’s
garrulous talk, and so, when they get old, they are repaid in the same
coin.
Are you laying up any mental riches for your old age? I know an old
lady so feeble that she cannot stir from her chair, and whose eyes have
failed so that she cannot tell day from night, and who is so deaf that
she cannot be read to, but who passes her days delightfully reciting
to herself whole cantos of Scott and Byron and recalling word for word
chapters of Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her mind to her a
kingdom is, in which she finds entertainment and amusement. Will you be
amused or bored when you are in your nineties and have nothing but your
own society? I know another woman, middle-aged, who is deliberately
laying up a treasure of memories of travel to solace her in her old
age. She will never know a dull moment, for she will have something to
think about besides her rheumatism and her diet when she sits alone in
the twilight of life.
Old age comes to us all. Don’t let it find you empty-handed or
empty-minded. Thus shall you make it a time of happiness instead of
torment.
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Transcriber’s Notes
pg 58 Changed: which are resonsible for more real
to: which are responsible for more real
pg 61 Changed: you happen to be born in a certain relationshp
to: you happen to be born in a certain relationship
pg 71 Changed: any particular trade or profesion
to: any particular trade or profession
pg 101 Changed: earn her own living as a “poor working women.”
to: earn her own living as a “poor working woman.”
pg 105 Changed: so far be it from me to abridge
to: so far be it for me to abridge
pg 150 Changed: life better than than that of the successful
to: life better than that of the successful
pg 179 Changed: he will be filled fell of pep and energy
to: he will be filled full of pep and energy
pg 179 Changed: discovery that somewhow the mysterious something
to: discovery that somehow the mysterious something
pg 188 Changed: she is not likely to tarnish your deal.
to: she is not likely to tarnish your ideal.
pg 217 Changed: as many men starving for affection as there are woman.
to: as many men starving for affection as there are women.
pg 218 Changed: reward depends altogther on his wife’s attitude
to: reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude
pg 221 Changed: their purpose when they falter and waiver
to: their purpose when they falter and waver
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