Part 5

Remember that, ladies, and don’t make your baby your husband’s deadly rival.

XII

LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS

These few lines are addressed to the thousands of girls who have finished school and who are now standing, as the poet puts it, “where the brook and river meet” wondering “where do we go from here?”

I want to urge you, girls, with all the earnestness of which I am capable, to psychoanalyze yourselves and try to find out what talents and aptitudes nature bestowed upon you, and then to go to some school where you can develop your gift and fit yourself to be self-supporting.

I give this advice to the rich girl no less than to the poor girl, for in these days of shifting fortunes we have the new poor as well as the new rich, and no woman knows how soon she may be called upon to earn her own bread and butter or starve. If she has been taught how to do this, losing her money is merely an inconvenience to her; but if she does not know how to earn a dollar, it is a tragedy.

No women in the world are so pitiful as those who have, as the saying goes, “seen better days” and, with their money gone, are suddenly flung out into the world to make their own living, with no trade, no profession, no skill in any line, no knowledge of how to make a penny. They can only eke out an existence by doing the most ill-paid work, or else they become parasites, or are forced by hunger, and shabbiness, and need into the sad sisterhood of the streets.

Don’t risk such a fate befalling you. Prepare yourself in time against it. Have that within yourself which will not be affected by the fall in stocks or the depreciation of real estate. Many things may rob you of your fortune, but you cannot lose your trained brain and skilful hand. They will be a resource that you can always fall back upon in any emergency.

Of course I know, when I urge you girls to fit yourselves to learn some gainful occupation by which you can support yourselves, that you smile and say to yourselves that you do not expect to earn your own living long. You are going to marry and follow woman’s oldest profession, that of wife and mother. That is as may be. In the past the great majority of women have been able to count, with a fair degree of safety, on being able to marry, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that the girl of to-day will get a husband.

There has been a most decided decline and falloff in matrimony and home life, and it is foolish for girls to think that they have the same chance of marrying that their mothers and grandmothers had. Now, for the girl who is sitting around and waiting for some man to come along and marry her, it is a catastrophe to be passed by. She becomes the sour and disgruntled old maid, eating the bitter bread of dependence, the fringe on some family that doesn’t want her. Or else she has to take any sort of a poor stick of a man as a prop to lean upon.

Far different is it with the girl who has fitted herself for some definite work and is competently doing it. She has a profession in which she is vitally interested. She has an occupation which fills her time. She makes enough money to indulge herself in the luxuries that women love, and so marriage becomes to her merely an incident of life, not the whole thing. If the right man comes along, well and good. If not, also well and good. She has her pleasant, independent, interesting life as a girl bachelor. The world to her is full of such a number of things besides wedding rings.

Furthermore, girls, even if you do marry, you may still need to keep on being a bread-winner instead of becoming a breadmaker. The high cost of living has to be reckoned with, and not every man under present economic conditions is able to support a family alone and unaided. In the past the good wife helped her husband by doing the housework, and turning, and mending, and pinching the pennies. In the future the good wife will doubtless help her husband by keeping on with her well-paid job and assisting in making the money to give her family the living conditions, and her children the education that the man alone could not afford to give them. So, except among the rich, marriage is going to mean a retirement from business no more for women than it is for men.

Another reason why I urge you, girls, to learn some gainful occupation and perfect yourself in it is because it will do more than any other one thing to make you happy. It will keep you from being bored, and boredom is at the root of all fretful discontent. People who are busy, who have a definite object in view and are striving to attain it, find the day all too short, are always content and cheerful. And talk about thrills! You never really know one until you hold your first pay envelope in your hand and it surges over you that the money in it represents your own work that was good enough for somebody to pay for.

Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.

But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.

So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big pay envelope.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or profession.

We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature intended you to be.

Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.

But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always got a hundred in spelling at school.

There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase goes, and that points the road for you to follow.

If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude. You will always hate it and be bored by it.

The successful people are those who love their work so well that it is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their thoughts.

Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it seems to you romantic or elegant.

Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are fewer women experts than there are men.

There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers, or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.

Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly. And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they were grotesque failures.

Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of good work.

Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it. Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes. Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid. Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart and your back into it, and your success will be assured.

XIII

TRIAL DIVORCE

I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.

The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony demands.

The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute longer and rush off to the divorce courts.

But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his nerves.

The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.

And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.

The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close range.

Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to him.

Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they would find that they preferred the old love to the new.

For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had and are about to lose.

Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib love-maker.

The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or not.

The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.

So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.

XIV

MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE

A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive; in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.

This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.

Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog. Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just being loved.

It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake, and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.

All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.

The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy, too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.

There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.

A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him. He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.

A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.

She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a still hunt to find her real soul-mate.

To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.

The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”

The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no trouble to please them.

But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.