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.