Part 12
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.
“The next way to help your husband is by keeping yourself cheerful and 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.