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[Illustration: _Yours Sincerely_

_Dorothy Dix_]

_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_

Every-day Help For Every-day People

[Illustration: Decoration]

SECOND EDITION

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK and LONDON 1927

Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention of the Pan-American Republics and the United States, August 11, 1910.

_Contents_

CHAPTER PAGE

FOREWORD xi

INTRODUCTION xix

I HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED 1

II CHARM 10

III THE ORDINARY WOMAN 22

IV TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER 27

V STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY 32

VI JEALOUSY 39

VII HAVE A GOAL 44

VIII THE GOAT FAMILY 48

IX SPOILING A WIFE 53

X THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS 58

XI THE DEADLY RIVAL 63

XII LEARN A TRADE, GIRLS 67

XIII TRIAL DIVORCE 76

XIV MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE 81

XV ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF? 87

XVI KEEPING YOUNG 92

XVII GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN 96

XVIII THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN 100

XIX AN INDOOR SPORT 105

XX SHOULD WOMEN TELL? 109

XXI DOMESTIC BOREDOM 114

XXII TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY 118

XXIII WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT 122

XXIV GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS 127

XXV ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER? 132

XXVI THE MORAL MUSCLES OF YOUR CHILDREN 136

XXVII THE MOTHER-IN-LAW 140

XXVIII WHY OUR FAMILIES RILE US 145

XXIX OUR LIVES ARE WHAT WE MAKE THEM 149

XXX HUSBAND LOSERS 154

XXXI MARTHA OR MARY? 159

XXXII THE T. B. M. AT HOME 163

XXXIII DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM 169

XXXIV QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE 174

XXXV HUSBANDS—THE LIVING CONUNDRUM 180

XXXVI THE POWER OF SUGGESTION 185

XXXVII WOMAN’S MISSIONARY OPPORTUNITY 190

XXXVIII HOW TO BE A GOOD HUSBAND 195

XXXIX GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES 200

XL SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN 205

XLI TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS” 210

XLII BEING A GOOD WIFE 215

XLIII INVALIDISM A GRAFT 222

XLIV SELFISHNESS MADE TO ORDER 227

XLV SELF-CONTROL 231

XLVI OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS 236

XLVII LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE 240

XLVIII THE LURE OF THE MARRIED MAN 245

XLIX FORGET IT 249

L LOST LOVE 254

LI THE SHOW WEDDING 259

LII WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE 264

LIII WHAT PRICE PLEASURE? 269

LIV THE IDEAL MOTHER 273

LV HOW TO CATCH A WIFE 278

LVI DANGEROUS GIRLS 283

LVII WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN 288

LVIII MARRIAGE LESSONS 293

LIX THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN 297

LX NEW IDEALS FOR OLD 301

LXI WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON 305

LXII THE CHILDREN PAY 310

LXIII THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING 315

LXIV A FATHER’S INFLUENCE 320

LXV THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN 325

LXVI A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME 330

LXVII DEVOURING FRIENDS 334

LXVIII THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS 338

LXIX PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE 343

_Foreword_

_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_

A FOREWORD BY RICHARD DUFFY

To the accurately estimated millions of readers who are familiar with Dorothy Dix’s understanding and interpretation of the plain facts of everyday life and also its enigmas, it may appear a presumption that one should attempt a foreword of explanation to make clear why a choice of her daily contributions to the press, not only in the United States and Canada, but also in farther regions of the world, should be deemed worthy of the more permanent shelter of book covers. But it becomes at once justifiable when we try to present a true account of the work of “The Little Lady of New Orleans,” as one of her oldest editors calls her. She herself confesses that, among the hundreds of letters she receives each day from men and women, young, adult and aged, there recur the questions: “Are you a real person, or only a newspaper syndicate name?” “Are you a man, or are you a woman?” “Are you married or single?” “Have you ever been married?” “If you have not been married, would you marry?” “If you have been married—and are not now—would you marry again?” “Have you any children? If so—are they boys or girls—and how many?” It must be emphasized that the questions above recorded are not asked by correspondents merely curious, who put the questions just to probe the author of the Dorothy Dix articles. Not at all, these questions are asked in letters revealing the puzzles of life that entangle the very writers who address Dorothy Dix. Before they make the simplest inquiry as to the trustworthiness of Dorothy Dix, they tell their own troubles in the way we all have of saying: “Of course what I have said to you is wholly confidential. Now let me know where you stand—I mean about absolute personal fidelity.” To a hard-boiled business man, or business woman, such a remark seems trite. Yet, we must remember that hard-boiled business persons run to the courts every so often to discover between themselves, at great expense, how personal fidelity, in gush and in fact, sharply contrast.

The self-styled hard-boiled people and the people who pretend they are less sophisticated than they are, look to Dorothy Dix for a way out of all their troubles. These two classes are to be reckoned with, because they are always telling their troubles to some confidant—the less known, the better. But the vast majority of the people who write to Dorothy Dix for counsel and guidance are profoundly sincere and earnest, not so much because they fear to be otherwise, but because they are so firmly persuaded of the sincerity and earnestness of life itself, when they look it square in the face and without pose of any kind. All and any of these correspondents of Dorothy Dix are struggling with their problems of how to make life livable. In the case of the young woman who has a good job and, at the same time, has a good home with her parents, the question arises whether she should marry the man she likes, and who on his part likes her, and then undertake to become a parent herself without a salaried job and without the safeguard of the home provided by her father and mother. On the other side there appears the problem of the young man, who would marry, but for responsibilities, psychological as well as financial, that make him stop, look and listen before he leaves a dependent father and mother unsupported.

We pass to the men and women who are actually married and suddenly discover that they are facing the real and inevitable conflict of life at home as compared with the daily battle of the business world. Some husbands are go-getters, but they do not get anywhere because their wives are shiftless as home managers, or because they are spendthrifts, and would always, without trying, spend twice as much money as any husband has, or can earn. Some wives are the best of helpmates, but are linked to husbands who simply cannot or will not achieve the quiet fame of a weekly pay-envelope which is the rock foundation of “Home Sweet Home.”

Some wives are afflicted with the disease of “social climbing.” They spend their days and nights proving to their husbands that for every dollar earned, it is better to spend two dollars, in order to take a chance at three, by inviting the Smiths to the theatre and to supper afterward. Such wives usually overlook the fact that the Smiths, with whom they would curry favor at great expense, are themselves spending two dollars for every one dollar gained on the principle that it is a good investment to obtain equal social standing with the Joneses.

Also to be encountered in this book are the varied specimens of husbands and wives who have become tired of each other and seek from Dorothy Dix guidance towards a way out of what they consider the morass of marriage. Then, too, we meet the father, or the mother, who is perplexed about the way children grow up nowadays—as tho the way children grew up has not always been a surprise to parents since the days of Romulus and Remus. To sum up, all _dramatis personæ_ in the stupendous play of life, being enacted day in and day out, as we live, are brought on the world’s stage before us, not so much by Dorothy Dix as by themselves in the confidences they repose in her and the disclosures they make about themselves.

Despite this fact there never has been nor will there be anything merely approaching a betrayal of confidence by Dorothy Dix. She talks to the whole world of men and women, and their worries and concerns are so alike that all shadow of individual identity is lost. She talks to them, not from the pedestal of the highbrow, but from the average level of a human being, who herself has fought the grim battle of life—as may be learned from her personal statement, which immediately follows these pages. One of the most distinguished of living American novelists, on being shown a few letters in her day’s mail, asked:

“How many such letters do you receive a month?”

She replied: “It takes me from three to four hours each day to answer my correspondents—and then I have to write my articles besides.”

“Great Scott!” exclaimed the novelist. “You have more plots in a day’s letters than any hard-working novelist could invent in a year.”

But none of these potential plots is available even for the most prolific of story-writers, because they are not “plots” to Dorothy Dix, but sacred testimonies to the help the “Little Lady of New Orleans” has been able to render through many years to her ever-increasing number of friends and confidants.

_Introduction_

MY PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

I have had what people call a hard life. I have been through the depths of poverty and sickness. I have known want and struggle and anxiety and despair. I have always had to work beyond the limit of my strength.

As I look back upon my life, I see it as a battlefield strewn with the wrecks of dead dreams and broken hopes and shattered illusions—a battle in which I always fought with the odds tremendously against me, and which has left me scarred and bruised and maimed and old before my time.

Yet I have no pity for myself; no tears to shed over the past and gone sorrows; no envy for the women who have been spared all that I have gone through.

For I have lived. They have only existed. I have drunk the cup of life down to the very dregs. They have only sipped at the bubbles on the top of it.

I know things they will never know. I see things to which they are blind. It is only the women whose eyes have been washed clear with tears who get the broad vision that makes them little sisters to all the world.

This of itself is a compensation for many sorrows, but I have more. I have proved myself to myself. I know that I have the strength to endure and the courage to carry on, and that I will not be craven enough to run up the white flag, no matter what other difficulties I may be called upon to meet.

The skeleton at the feast of the woman who has always been happy and prosperous is fear. She becomes panic-stricken when she thinks that she may be called upon to meet trouble; that she may have hardships to endure; that her soul may be torn with suffering. She suffers with apprehension at the thought of poverty, and wonders how she could endure to go shabby and do without the things to which she is accustomed. She wonders helplessly what she would do if she had to earn her own living.

_I am not afraid of poverty_ because I have been poor and I know that poverty has its consolations and brings you pleasures that money cannot buy. Nor am I afraid to support myself. I have earned my bread and butter for many years. I know the joy of work and I know that to a woman, just the satisfaction of knowing that she is self-supporting turns her crust into angel’s food.

None of the fears with which happy women torture themselves upon occasion have any terrors for me. I know them for the bogies they are, and know, too, that they fly away before the person who does not cringe before them.

Often I am tempted to envy the woman who has always had some strong man to stand between her and the world, some man whose tenderness and love has guarded and protected her. But I am consoled for not being a clinging vine when I wonder what the vine would do and think how broken it would be if the sturdy oak on which it hangs were laid low.

I have learned in the great University of Hard Knocks a philosophy that no woman who has had an easy life ever acquires. I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading to-morrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. I put that dread from me because experience has taught me that when the time comes that I so fear, the strength and wisdom to meet it will be given me.

Little annoyances have no longer the power to affect me. After you have seen your whole edifice of happiness topple and crash in ruins about you, it never matters to you again that a servant forgets to put the doilies under the finger bowls or the cook spills the soup.

I have learned not to expect too much of people and so I can still get happiness out of the friend who isn’t quite true to me, or the acquaintance who gossips about me, and I can even find pleasure in the society of those whose motives I see through.

Above all I have acquired a sense of humor, because there were so many things over which I had either to laugh or cry. And when a woman can joke over her troubles instead of having hysterics, nothing can ever hurt her much again.

So I do not regret the hardships I have known because through them I have touched life at every point. I have lived. And it was worth the price I had to pay.

DOROTHY DIX.

_Dorothy Dix—Her Book_

HOW A HUSBAND LIKES TO BE TREATED

Altho marriage has been the chief business of woman since Eve pulled off the first wedding in the Garden of Eden, women have not yet mastered the first indispensable principle of success in their profession. Millions of women have been married. Hundreds of thousands of women marry annually, and yet, as a class, women do not know how to treat a husband.

Here and there is a shining exception to this rule, and the result is an inspiring picture of domestic bliss. But the great majority of women still go stumbling along into misery and divorce because they have not had the wit to find out how to rub man’s fur the right way, and make him purr under their hands.

In a word, women fail to strike just the right note in their attitude towards their husbands. Sometimes they treat them better than they deserve. Sometimes worse, but seldom do they treat the men just as the men would like to be treated.

Perhaps the real reason that women fail in this most important particular is because they make the mistake of treating a husband as if he were a rational human being, and the same sort of an individual inside of the home circle that he is outside of it.

Never was there a greater error. The John Smith to whom a woman is married is no more the John Smith of the business world than he is some other man.

The John Smith, who is a lawyer, or a doctor, or a grocer in the outer world, is a big, strong, broad, self-reliant man who looks at everything in a large way, and is just, and tolerant, and even stoical in meeting the vicissitudes of life. The woman who marries him has perceived all of these qualities, and loved him for them, and she naturally expects him to exhibit these characteristics in home life.

Fatal blunder. John Smith, the business man, may be dealt with on a plain, sensible, aboveboard platform, but John Smith the husband, has to be jollied, and cajoled, and petted, and wheedled along the road he should go, if there is anything doing in the domestic felicity line in the household of which he is the alleged head.

Now the majority of husbands average up quite as well as the majority of wives, but even when a man is really good, and true, and strong, experience teaches his wife that there are three ways in which he likes her to treat him. They are:

(a) Like a baby.

(b) Like a demigod.

No matter how big and strong a man is, nor how many other men he bosses, he wants his wife to treat him as if he were a delicate infant who had to be petted, and nursed, and dandled, and chucked under the chin. There isn’t a man living whose secret ideal of a perfect wife isn’t a woman who puts the buttons in his shirt, and lays out his collar and tie in the morning, who has his slippers toasting on the radiator when he comes home of an evening, and who cooks just the particular thing he likes to eat, with her own hands.

Talk about your women who can hand out intellectual companionship! Produce your living pictures! Exhibit your paragons of virtue! They are simply not one, two, three with the wise dame who pets and fusses over her lord and master. And it isn’t because the man really wants his wife to wait on him. That doesn’t enter into it at all. He’s just like the three-year-old who howls for mama to put on his shoes or butter his bread when there are seven nurses standing around to do it.

Men are babyish in wanting their wives to show them off. The expression on the face of little Tommy while his fond mother is telling the smart things that he said, is exactly the same expression that is on Tommy’s father’s face while his wife is bragging about how he organized a trust, or won a big lawsuit, or was elected judge.

Wise,—oh, a daughter of Solomon is the woman who puts her husband through his paces for the benefit of company. Matrimony is one long, glad sweet song in the household of the lady who acts as a showman for hubby.

Consider also a man when he is sick, or thinks he is sick. How does he want to be treated then? Like a baby. He wants his wife to sit by his bed, and hold his hand, and weep tears of sympathy, and if she doesn’t believe he is going to die every time he has a headache, he considers her a cold, heartless icicle and doubts her affection.

Therefore, the very first principle in treating a husband is to treat him as if he was your littlest baby, and if you do, he will gurgle, and coo just as your two-year-old does when you smother him with kisses, and asks: “‘Oose de most booflest boy on earf, an’ mudders itty, pitty wonder, and world beater?”

Secondly, every husband likes to be treated as if he were a demigod.

Men won’t admit it, but in his soul every husband feels that he has conferred such an inestimable boon upon his wife by marrying her that she can never really repay him, anyway, but that it is up to her to keep busy on the job. Therefore, the least she can do is to act grateful.

The real reason why there is a continual conflict in most families over the money question is not because husbands are stingy, but because a man likes to dole the money out, piece by piece, so that the woman who gets it may have a living exhibition of his generosity.

When a man complains about how extravagant his wife is, and how much her hat and dress cost, it doesn’t mean that he begrudges her a single garment or the price thereof. On the contrary, it is his way of boasting to the world of how prosperous he is, and how well he provides for his family. Stupid, indeed, is the woman who does not comprehend this, and who does not keep her glad rags hanging in public, so to speak, and continually beat upon the cymbal, and chant pæans of praise about how good her husband is to provide her with her lovely clothes.

Nor is this as silly as it sounds. The average man gets practically nothing out of his labor, after he has supported his family, but his board and clothes, and it is pretty discouraging to spend your life toiling for those who take all that you can give, and make no sign of appreciation in return. So it is not strange that husbands like their wives to treat them as a beneficent providence from whom all blessings flow.

Husbands like to be treated as good fellows.

If the average married man could put up one prayer more fervent than all the rest it would be this: “Lord, send me a wife who laughs, and a home that isn’t an understudy to a funeral parlor!”

But his prayer isn’t often answered.

Now one of the great reasons why so many husbands and wives make shipwreck of their lives together is because a man is always seeking for happiness, while a woman is on a perpetual still hunt for trouble. When anything uncomfortable happens to a man he tries to forget it, to put it behind him, to get it out of his thoughts, even if he has to drown it in drink. When a misfortune befalls a woman she gloats over it. She keeps pressing her finger on every sore until she makes a raging abscess of it. Then she goes on a jag of tears.

The result of this feminine peculiarity is that the average home is not a cheerful place, nor is the average wife a joyous companion, and that is why a very large number of husbands seek their amusements elsewhere, and with other people. The greatest danger that menaces domesticity is that so many wives are killjoys.

The question is often asked—why do men, who are penurious and niggardly to their families, and who never pay a household bill without grumbling, spend money so lavishly on their vices? The answer is easy. A man’s home is dull, and the money that his family costs him gives him no fillip of pleasure. The other does. The home has been made to mean to him nothing but hard duty, ungilded by any joy. The opening of champagne for chorus girls is to the tune of gaiety and laughter. Therefore, he is willing to pay for one and begrudges paying for the other.

Once I was listening to a group of intelligent people discuss the most desirable quality in a wife. They named the usual standard virtues until suddenly one man burst out in a voice surcharged with genuine emotion.