HEALTH OF THE YOUNG WIFE.
Health Insures Happiness.—Be Ambitious for Health.—The Scarcity
of Perfectly Healthy Women.—Fashion to the Rescue.—The Boon
of Health.—Necessity of Ventilation and Fresh Air.—Duties to
the Home.—The Greatness of Woman’s Sphere.—In the Society
Drift.—The Extreme of Wholly Avoiding Society.—Keeping in
the Middle of the Road.—Pleasures and Recreations Taken
Together.—Taking Time to Keep Young.—Mistakes Which Some
Husbands Make.—Wrecks at the Beginning of Married Life.
To be a successful home-maker, the young wife must be well and know how
to conserve her health. While the husband may be patience itself yet
an invalid in the home, and that invalid the home-maker, is a serious
drawback to happiness.
Sir James Paget, in a lecture on national health, says, “We want more
ambition for health. I should like to see a personal ambition for health
as keen as that for bravery, for beauty, or for success in our athletic
games or field sports. I wish there were such an ambition for the most
perfect national health, as there is for national renown in war, in art,
or in commerce.”
“All women ought to know that invalidism, speaking generally—there are,
of course, exceptions to this rule,—is a carefully cultivated condition,
quite as truly as the magnificent condition of the prize-fighter, the
race-horse or the gymnast.”
It has become a rare thing, to-day, to find a woman who counts herself
_perfectly_ healthy. Is it possible that womankind has become so
susceptible to influence, that she imagines herself ill when she is not?
We are more or less creatures of imitation, and yield to the force of our
surroundings without a murmur. More than this, we must admit that among
the many a semi-invalidism is considered genteel and attractive. True, in
the last few years we have made some effort to rise above this, and a few
have succeeded.
Even Dame Fashion herself has started a line of reforms that we trust
will continue popular, until they have become fixtures. Short skirts,
heavy shoes, natural waists are sought by a fairly large number to-day;
but we dare not prophesy what would be the result did another turn of the
wheel of fashion decree otherwise. The agitation must be increased until
no backward step is possible along these lines, and until our daughters
will desire comfort and healthfulness in dress, rather than fashion, and
its frequent result, disease.
It is not enough that you as a wife, come to your marriage with good
health, but that you do all in your power to conserve it in the days
and months thereafter. It is safe to say, if from principle and wise
judgment you learn in the new relations during the first year, how best
to preserve and conserve your strength, you will carry this knowledge and
practice with you through life.
First you must consider health a priceless boon, before you lose it.
In the new relations fix your habits of exercise and recreation
carefully, and adhere to them. Learn how to rest, before you have reached
the point nervously where rest is impossible. Do not presume too much
upon your splendid health, and overdo daily. Stop before you have reached
the limit of your strength.
If you have not learned about the necessity of good ventilation in the
home, learn it at once, and let in daily the fresh, pure, life-giving
sunshine and fresh air, room-fulls of it. Do not be afraid of adding to
the fuel bill, for warm air charged with poison will heat less easily
than pure, cold air which invites the warmth. Have plenty of fresh
air in your sleeping rooms, for it is quite necessary to your rising
clear-brained and sweet-tempered; and never forget that you will be
largely responsible for the mental and moral atmosphere of the home.
Be careful and guarded as to your society demands, lest they steal your
time and strength, and you be unfitted for the real duties of your home.
Home _must_ hereafter _always_ be to you first and foremost in your heart
and duty, if you fill your position truly.
Be not misled by the false philosophy of the day, that tends in many
instances to underrate the home and its high blessedness in the life of
woman.
An Eastern proverb tells us that, “The house rests upon the mother.” Just
as soon as you take upon yourself the vows that make you wife, you become
the mother of a home. Whether children ever come to bless it or not, you
are its mother. Yet few women appreciate the importance or power of this
position. With the grain of truth there is in it, there is a great deal
of wasteful talk about woman, and her narrow sphere. Even though she be
tied to the home and the little ones, yet her sphere is just as wide as
she has a mind to make it. Four walls cannot shut in a large-hearted,
loving woman. From the home blessed by her presence goes out a stream of
mighty influence.
Put into a woman’s sphere all the depth and sweetness, and wisdom, and
comfort, that the words, love, home, mother and children comprehend,
and dare to call her sphere narrow if you will! To me it is so wide
that I have seen few women who make themselves large enough to fill it,
and these few are not found among those who talk of its narrowness and
drudgery. The light of the home, the beacon for the husband, the teacher
and guide for little feet, the sharer in all the secrets and joys, the
consoler in all sorrows—how do the little annoyances and patience-trying
cares dwindle into insignificance, when compared with these. What in
public life can win her from a life like this, if she have it to do?
Thoughtlessly many young wives get into the society drift before they
know it, and their best strength is wasted, and they are laying the
foundations for a young old age. Nervously overwrought, hysteria comes in
with its train of multitudinous ills, and destroys both her comfort and
that of the home.
On the other hand do not go to the opposite extreme, which many young
people in the first days of their married happiness selfishly fall into,
namely, avoiding society altogether. Once out of the pleasant, social
round of friends it is hard to regain your lost footing, and you fret
under it that your old friends are so cold and indifferent.
“Keep to the middle of the road,” in these things, and you will hold your
youth and friends, and make a home that it is good to go into. As far
as possible take your pleasures and recreations together. Plan for each
other in this, and see how it keeps the sweetness in life.
A fresh, bright, young looking neighbor called on me a few days ago,
and when, during our conversation, she spoke of her age as forty-two, I
was amazed, and said: “I should never have thought you were more than
thirty-five.”
“I have kept young,” she replied, “and I know how. If there has ever been
pleasure taken in our family, it is always planned for when I can enjoy
it. In the evening when the cares of the day are over, or when I can get
away from the cares at other times.” She has five splendid children, and
the promise of a sixth. She does the larger part of her home work, and
yet takes time to keep young.
It rests with you largely, young wives, during the first years of your
lives together to fix the habits of our home in the duties of rest and
recreation. Have firm principles about these matters and insist lovingly
upon them.
And now a word upon a more delicate question, but one which has much
to do with settling and perfecting all the others, or spoiling your
happiness almost irremediably. Many a marriage which otherwise would have
been happy, is wrecked in the first days of the honeymoon.
Frightened and timid, and filled with a vague unrest at the mysteries
of marriage which await their revelation, you place your destiny in the
keeping of your husband, for wedded happiness or wedded woe. Whispers
and covert suggestions of the unwise ones about you, as they allude to
the life you are coming to, have given you this unrest, and it remains
for the husband, by his loving considerateness to win you away from
fearfulness to a sure confidence in himself.
Many otherwise kind men have become possessed with the thought that every
right is theirs immediately; and in their inconsiderate, rapacious
passion, in the speedy consummation of marriage, at whatever cost of pain
or wounded feeling on the part of her whom they have taken to love and
honor, they well nigh wreck the after happiness of both in the first days
of their united lives.
Husband beware of the wrong of committing a veritable outrage upon the
person of her whom God has given you as your companion, and suffering
ever after the stings of remorse, that she never again can feel the same
respect and love for you that she could, had you been more considerate of
her feelings and desires.
It will be difficult for her to be persuaded that the animal nature
does not control and dominate your love for her, rather than the higher
instincts of the soul.
It would be far better for every prospective bride if she suspects that
the man who is to be her husband has not been informed in these things in
a wholesome way, either herself, or through the intervention of a friend
to put into his hands books that will teach him wisely and well these
things upon which so much of his happiness depends.
I wish it were binding upon every young man before he stands at the
marriage altar, to read carefully and painstakingly Dr. Stall’s books
for young men and young husbands. With the earnest words and teachings
of these books ringing in their hearts they could hardly live careless
lives, or make the mistakes which, in ignorance of the great truths he
inculcates, they might otherwise do.