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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75448 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  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.
+
+
+
+
+_The Blue Book of Social Usage_—
+
+Etiquette
+
+In Society, In Business, In Politics, and At Home
+
+_By EMILY POST_
+
+
+“The most complete book on social usage that ever grew between two
+covers.” There are 24 pages about introductions and greetings, 7 about
+street conduct, 13 on conduct at the theatre, 10 on conversation, 25 on
+cards and visits, 33 on invitations, 12 on teas, 61 on dinners, 12 on
+breakfasts and suppers, 26 on balls and dances, 12 on “the debutante,”
+12 on matrimonial engagements, 33 on preparations for the wedding,
+35 on “the day of the wedding,” 23 on funerals, 58 on letters, 22 on
+dress, 9 on the clothes of a gentleman, 34 on the well-appointed house,
+24 on traveling at home and abroad.
+
+The author is a shining figure in society and her charming and popular
+book is accepted everywhere as the authoritative Blue Book of Social
+Usage. Illustrated.
+
+ _Crown 8vo, Cloth. 639 pages. $4, net; flexible leather, $7.50, net;
+ postage, 18c extra._
+
+
+
+
+_The Blue Book of Personal Attire_—
+
+How to Dress Well
+
+
+A valuable treatise by an authority which considers dress for women
+from both the artistic and the practical view-points, and provides
+sound information on the principles of tasteful and attractive apparel.
+Not only does this book give details for enhancing one’s personal
+appearance, for slenderizing the stout, for broadening the slender, for
+the selection of headwear and other accessories, but also practical
+guidance for the selection and testing of materials, choosing of laces
+and furs, budgeting the dress allowance, and for the care and up keep
+of the wardrobe. It is brimful of the very information pertaining to
+dress, color, and toilet accessories about which every woman hesitates
+to accept any but truly trustworthy advice and is a fitting companion
+to Emily Post’s “Etiquette.” Modistes, designers, dressmakers, and
+milliners will also find this work of highest value. Illustrated.
+
+ _8vo, Cloth. 494 pages. $3.50, net; postage, 18c extra._
+
+
+
+
+The Blue Book of Cookery And Manual of House Management
+
+_By ISABEL COTTON SMITH_
+
+_With an Introduction by Emily Post, Author of “Etiquette”_
+
+
+This is not “just another cookbook,” but an original and authoritative
+guide for the preparation of foods and for house management. All the
+originality and importance of this volume would be of limited value
+unless it were written by so capable and practical an authority as
+Isabel Cotton Smith. It contains more than 2,000 recipes; gives
+complete information on the management of house and home, with
+invaluable suggestions for table economy, and includes everything for
+every season and every day in the year, for every possible repast from
+breakfast to late supper and from teas and picnic meals to specially
+designed menus for children at home and at school, as well as menus for
+vegetarians.
+
+ _Crown 8vo, Washable Fabrikoid. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra._
+
+
+
+
+A Woman of Fifty
+
+_By RHETA CHILDE DORR_
+
+
+This unique autobiography of a remarkable and courageous woman covers
+one of the most revolutionary periods of time in history—from virtually
+the beginning of a concerted movement to organize the women of this
+country in the fight for equality in politics and industry to the time
+when these hitherto unattainable causes were firmly established in our
+economic and governmental systems. As journalist, lecturer, editor, and
+writer, the author has taken part in virtually every event that marks
+her generation; was the only woman war correspondent with the famed
+Russian Women’s “Battalion of Death” on the last Kerensky offensive
+on the Eastern Front; spent three years in “after war” Europe, and is
+to-day in the thick of things in this country. Written in a frank,
+forceful, and grippingly interesting style.
+
+ _8vo, Cloth. 482 pp. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra._
+
+
+  FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers
+  354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York
+
+
+
+
+  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
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75448 ***