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.