side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more
reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she
should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for
and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her
victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward
woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her
own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense
of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to
have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They
treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the
occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all
that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more
and more evident that men are less willing to support their families
and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be
wage-earners even after they are married.
Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty.
In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he
demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the
shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are
few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all
been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would
have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes
tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear
them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry
who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than
their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual
conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous
and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no
attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically
admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to
spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope
to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is
obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of
modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both
sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of
humanity.
Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back
of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought
that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment,
and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what
the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always
fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often
a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a
success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are
husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have
kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and
women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority
of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each
other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can
tell.
LXI
WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON
When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of
incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial
a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports
who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their
bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit,
infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the
wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a
divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and
hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no
pity for them.
Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in
the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as
incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a
man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that
they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there
any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily
contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who
gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a
perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big
fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big
sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the
little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions
are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the
difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get
married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that
divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.
Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at
everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every
situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different
race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been
brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought.
Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods
and at different altars and eat different dishes.
What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of
incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have
the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic
thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and
wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable,
or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is
perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They
can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought
up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a
dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable
feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn
in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make
a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.
On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make
a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen
shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high
crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband
who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from
mussing up the best sofa cushion.
There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the
coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted,
demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made
over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their
mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because
they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed
temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then
there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in
restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who
has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What
superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging
him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all
frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!
Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits
and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that
the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot
bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars
are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the
use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for
one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have
to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the
partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating
neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that
one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of
old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the
disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to
breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he
is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.
These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to
observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred
to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in
habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is
at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it
is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder
is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do
adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and
harmony.
LXII
THE CHILDREN PAY
No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many
husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they
quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which
they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous
to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other,
and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he
or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a
scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way
of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are
running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s
happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers
in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of
stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones
they love and who love them.
It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so
many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare
goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many
a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to
say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an
acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along
with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other
persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others.
They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and
taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their
tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are
tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever
have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold
his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as
many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other
persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to
another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she
were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and
if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.
Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both
men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t
a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a
few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her
a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she
can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond
to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know
perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately
and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is
obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun
in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug
our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to
take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting
each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent
diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it
end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and
goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her
daily tasks.
The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they
who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves,
with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed
characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets
almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of
bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers
and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their
children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that
nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of
divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together.
Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known
an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married
parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.
Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin
the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t
just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up
the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You
think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean
half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit
than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the
children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning
to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions
shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with
no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you
may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them
from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a
breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.
Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling?
And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle
your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world
and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself
the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all
the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that
you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along
with other persons.
LXIII
THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING
No complaint is more general—possibly no belief is more prevalent among
women—than that a woman of intelligence wastes her energies and her
abilities in being merely a housekeeper. Following the domestic arts is
a despised calling, held in such contempt by the majority of women that
they never take the trouble to achieve success in it; and yet there is
no other occupation under the sun that requires so many and such varied
talents as does the learned profession of home-making. Did you ever
think what a woman must be in order to create and carry on a happy and
prosperous home?
She must be a financier. There can be no peace and pleasure in a
home where the wolf is always howling under the window and the bill
collector hammering on the door. There are, of course, a few men in
every community who are such gifted money-makers that they can annex
more coin than any woman can spend, but for the great mass of ordinary,
industrious, hard-working humanity the wife settles the financial
status of the family. It is her ability to handle money, her knowledge
of where to spend and where to economize, her knack of making a dollar
buy a hundred and five cents’ worth and get a blue trading stamp thrown
in to boot, that is at the foundation of every prosperous home. We
don’t hear anything about it, because the woman doesn’t know herself
how awfully clever she is, but the majority of women in this country
are doing marvels of financiering in the way they make both ends meet
in their housekeeping allowance, and keep up appearances, that entitle
them to qualify in the Rockefeller class.
She must be a general.
She must know how to command. She must know how to set all the
multitudinous wheels of household machinery in motion and be able
to keep them moving without friction. She must be able to enforce
obedience, inspire enthusiasm, plan campaigns, forestall her enemy, be
fertile in expedient and subtle in strategy. Any woman who maintains a
comfortable and well-ordered home, the kind of a house that we like to
visit, and who raises a nice family and marries her daughters off well
could give the commander-in-chief of the army points on generalship.
She must be a diplomat. The husband question, the children question and
the servant question are not to be handled without gloves. There is no
hour of the day that she is not called upon to deal with some problem
that requires the finesse of a Talleyrand. She must be able, if the
white-winged dove of peace is to brood over the home nest, to deal
with her husband’s prejudices and circumvent them so delicately that
he will never know that he is being induced to do the thing that he
swore he would never, never do. She must assert her authority over the
growing boy with such cunning that he does not perceive that her fine
Italian hand is on the check rein holding him tight and steady. She
must be able, without the girls dreaming that she does it, to insinuate
a doubt, drop a word of ridicule, imply an impossibility that will keep
her daughters out of entangling alliances and steer them toward the
reciprocally profitable permanent treaties they should make.
Above all, she must be able to see most when she is apparently stone
blind; hear everything when she seems to be as deaf as the adder of the
Scriptures; to be most on guard when she looks to be sleeping at her
post, and to be most chaperoning her daughters when the onlooker and
the girls themselves would swear that she was most giving them their
liberty.
She must know how to tread very softly if she keeps off the corns of
her servants, for whether a woman is agreeable or disagreeable in the
home her children are bound to stay there with her, but it is the
blessed privilege of Mary Ann and Bridget and eke of Hulda and Dinah
that they can pack their trunks and go. Only the very quintessence
of diplomacy renders a mistress _persona grata_ to the kitchen, and
the woman who preserves friendly relations with that must understand
the Alpha and Omega of how to make a jolly cover the discipline of a
martinet. Any woman who, when she is fifty years old, has a husband who
thinks her a Solomon in petticoats, grown children who quote mother’s
opinion, and a cook who has been with her five years is fitted to be
Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of
St. James’s, and nothing but the stupidity of a nation that believes
that breeches and brains are synonymous terms keeps her out of the job.
She must be an artist.
It is the woman’s province to create the beauty of the home. This is
true whether it is the palace of the millionaire or the three-room flat
of the day laborer. Every room that she arranges is a picture, just as
much as if she painted a Dutch interior on canvas.
She must be a poet.
A home is not merely a place of shelter and food—it is a thing no less
of the spirit and soul—and a woman must put into it the passion of her
heart and the joy of creating just as truly as a poet must put them
into his song. To make a home that is beautiful, that breathes the
spirit of home, that is a haven of peace and rest to those who live in
it and that is a glimpse of Paradise to the stranger who is bidden
within its gates is a profession the most exacting in which any woman
can engage and the one that calls for the greatest number of talents.
Also it is the most profitable, for within it are made the men and
women who go forth to bless the world. And the wonder of wonders is
that so many just plain ordinary women are doing it, and the greatest
marvel of all is that they do not realize what a glorious thing they
are doing!
LXIV
A FATHER’S INFLUENCE
There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted
view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it,
poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly
come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children
and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers
seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good
for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat
and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated
with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s
Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and
it comes around so often.
No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all
powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid
or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to
do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He
dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his
conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which
in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s
influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no
miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded
woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make
a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool
woman wise.
Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment
about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s
immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without
vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their
own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s
lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their
standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall
attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they
associate.
Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and
unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak,
incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too
well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and
of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly
subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good,
especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them
how fallacious such a belief is.
A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her
daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just
the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her
hands.
It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up
their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path.
But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence
upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their
own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and
example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their
very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that
wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are
the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy
on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their
extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what
a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one
who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting
married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse
yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he
can lump it.”