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.