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