Part 14

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.

“When your daughter was born, she was as plastic as clay in your hands. It was your privilege to mold her into any shape you pleased. You could have taught her to be unselfish, to be considerate, to think of other people, to love and honor and respect you. Instead of that, from her first conscious moment, you taught her to despise you, to think you of no account and not worth considering. You taught her to think only of herself, of her own pleasures and desires, and to get what she wanted at any cost to others. Now you whine because your teaching has borne fruit. You are unjust and unreasonable. What we sow, we reap inevitably. If you make yourself a doormat before your children, they will walk over you and kick you about, because they naturally think that you know where you belong in the household and have taken your proper place.

“They would just as naturally have looked up to you if you had placed yourself on a pedestal above them and demanded to be worshiped. Children don’t reason about their parents. They just accept them as they are and hold them cheap, or dear, according to the way the mother and father value themselves. I have no tears to shed over the sorrows of mothers who have selfish and ungrateful daughters, because every time it is the mother’s own fault. She is to blame, not the girl.

“If she had spent part of the clothes money on getting herself some pretty frocks, instead of lavishing it all on daughter, daughter would be proud of mother instead of being ashamed of her. If she had made daughter help with the housework and the sewing, instead of slaving over the cookstove and the sewing machine so that daughter might go free, daughter would think about saving mother and doing things for her. If she had asserted her rights to her own personal tastes and pleasures, instead of letting daughter’s tastes and pleasures rule the household, daughter would show her some consideration and remember mother’s likes and dislikes, and cater to them. There are mothers who are queens in their families, just as there are mothers who are nothing but the maid-of-all-work in their homes, and it rests with every mother to decide which she will be. It is the queen mothers who are loved and appreciated, and who have dutiful, unselfish children. The drudge mother gets only the wages of the drudge from her children.

“In reality, the mother who rears her children up to be monsters of selfishness has no right to expect appreciation and gratitude from them because she has done them as ill a turn as one human being can do another. She has warped their characters. She has developed in them traits that mar their happiness and are a handicap to success. She has made them egotists, and they are never satisfied and continually at variance with those about them. In particular is selfishness a blight upon a woman’s life, for the selfish woman finds it almost impossible to make the sacrifices that wifehood and motherhood demand of her. One of the main reasons why divorce is so prevalent is because when so many selfish girls find that they can’t treat their husbands as they did their mothers, they throw up their hands and quit.

“And so,” I said to the mother of the selfish daughter, “you are unfair to your daughter. Don’t blame her for being what you made her. What else could you expect?”

XLV

SELF-CONTROL

If I were to go to a mother who was cradling her babe on her breast, and tell her that I knew a magic formula by which she could insure power, and prosperity, and happiness to her child, she would impoverish herself to purchase this knowledge from me, and fall on her knees and bless me for having given it to her.

Yet I know just such a bit of white magic. In her secret soul every mother herself knows it, but ninety-nine times out of a hundred she is either too weak or too lazy to use it.

This charm that would have changed all life for innumerable people; that would have kept men out of prisons, and women out of brothels; that would have turned paupers into rich men; made the unsuccessful successful and stopped the wheels of the divorce court—consists simply in teaching children self-control.

Almost every misfortune under which humanity suffers goes straight back to that. There is hardly a derelict in the world who cannot say: “I would not be what I am if my mother had taught me to control myself.”

For it is lack of self-control that is at the bottom of most of our sins of omission and commission.

Look at the murderer going to the death chair. Not once in a thousand times is he a cold-blooded murderer; but he was a high-tempered child whose mother never taught him to control himself. There came a day when something irritated him more than usual and, aflame with anger, he took a fellow creature’s life. It is the supreme manifestation of the same spirit that made him kick the chair against which he stumbled as a child and beat with impotent little fists all who thwarted him.

Look at the drunkard wallowing in the gutter. He is there because his mother never taught him to control his appetites. He is the logical outgrowth of the greedy little boy who was permitted to gorge himself on cake and candy until it made him ill.

Look at the poor, shabby, out-at-elbows man who has drifted from job to job all his life, and has never been able to make a decent support for himself and his family. He is his mother’s handiwork. She put the curse of incompetence on him when she let him give up every undertaking the moment he struck the hard sledding in it.

He changed from one school to another because the lessons were too difficult, or the teacher was too strict. When he started to work, he left one place because the hours were too long, another because his boss was too exacting. He tried a dozen different occupations that he left because he found they had unpleasant features and involved doing uncongenial tasks. He is a down-and-outer because his mother never taught him the self-control that makes a man set his teeth and go through with the business to which he has put his hand.

Look at the girls who go astray. Not one of “the sorrowful sisterhood” as the Japanese pitifully call them, but who is what she is because her mother did not teach her self-control. Did the girl sin because she was so weak and so in love with some vicious libertine that she listened to her heart instead of her head? Her mother could have saved her from a fate worse than death if she had taught her to control her emotions, instead of being ruled by them.

Did the girl sell her soul for fine clothes, and good times? Again the mother’s fault for not teaching the girl self-control, and to do without the things that she could not honestly get.

Look at the poor old people who are dependent on their children, or the grudging charity of relatives and friends. In how many cases is their unhappy fate simply the result of their lack of self-control! They have had their chance of fortune. As long as the man was able to work he made plenty of money, and they lived luxuriously, but they spent everything as they went along. They laid up nothing for their rainy day, and when it came, it found them paupers and parasites. The difference between dependence and independence, between comfort and misery in your old age depends upon how much self-control you have had in your youth.

Look at the ever increasing number of divorces. Look at the forlorn half-orphan children, and broken up homes. Look at the unhappy married couples you know. What is the real cause of all this domestic trouble? Merely that mothers do not teach their children self-control. They raise up spoiled, selfish daughters who never consider a thing in life but their own pleasure.

They raised up spoiled, selfish sons who have never considered another human being but themselves. These two, with undisciplined wills, unrestrained tempers, undirected impulses, marry each other, and they fight like cats and dogs. Observation shows that either a husband or a wife who controls himself or herself can save almost any marriage, and it takes no prophet to foretell that mothers could insure their children’s domestic happiness by teaching them iron bound self-control.

You can teach a baby three weeks old self-control by refusing to give it the thing it howls for. Say to the toddler that falls and bumps its nose, “Mother’s brave boy doesn’t cry,” and it will bite back the sobs. It will yell the roof off if you pity it. A child of three will be obedient, cheerful, respectful of the rights of others, or he will be a little demon, according to the way his mother has brought him up.

If she has taught him self-control, she has given him the magic that works all the miracles of life, and if she hasn’t, she has done him the greatest wrong that any human being can possibly do to another human being.

XLVI

OLD FATHERS AND NEW DAUGHTERS

“O dear Miss Dix,” wails a little flapper, “won’t you please help me? Won’t you please try to make my father understand that I must do as people do now, instead of doing the way that he did when he was young? I’ve got the best daddy in the world, and I love him with all my heart; but he is ruining my life trying to make me the sort of girl that he says mother was. And I’m not mother. I am myself, and I don’t live thirty years ago. I live now, and I have to be a model girl of now or else a back-number at whom nobody will look and whom nobody wants. Father says he is an old-fashioned father, and he is trying to make me an old-fashioned girl. I never have any up-to-the-minute clothes because mother didn’t wear short skirts and no corsets and bob her hair. I can’t go joy-riding with a crowd because they didn’t have automobiles when father was young. I have to be home at 11 o’clock when I go out in the evening because he says that he never stayed out late when he was young.

“I can’t dance because father didn’t jazz and he doesn’t think the modern dances respectable. He won’t let me read any of the six best sellers because he doesn’t approve of modern literature, and he makes me read old-fashioned books that I almost yawn my head off over. And he just simply loathes all the boys who come to see me. Calls them sapheads, and he wonders why I want to waste my time talking nonsense with little jellybeans such as they are. He says it is just appalling to see how youth has deteriorated since his day, and that when he was young the boys and girls were all serious-minded young people, who cared only for rational amusements, and that instead of chasing around to cabarets they spent the evening at home in intelligent conversation.

“I suppose we young ones are a poor lot compared to what our parents were; but such as we are, we are. In Rome you have to do as the Romans do or else you get left. I want to play with the other girls and boys, but I can’t unless I play the way they do. My father is always talking about home being woman’s proper sphere, and wifehood and motherhood being a woman’s noblest career. But how am I to get married if I am never permitted to have any dates with boys? You might just as well lock a girl up in a stone cell and throw away the key as not to let her do what the other girls are doing. There are too many pretty girls, with lots of fun and pep in them, that the boys can run around with, for them to take the trouble to hunt up one that is laid up on the shelf and labeled ‘old-fashioned.’ And when I tell my father this he gets angry and I cry, and I don’t know what to do because I don’t want to disobey him and I don’t want to waste my youth sticking around at home and having no pleasure.”

“Alas, my dear,” I said, “your father is trying to foist his ideals on you, just as his father tried to foist his ideals on him. Each generation tries to do it and each makes dark prophecies about what the present generation is coming to. Your grandfather thought bustles just as dreadful as your father thinks rolled stockings are. Your grandfather disapproved of side-bar buggies just as much as your father does of automobiles. Your grandfather considered the waltz just as indecent as your father does shimmying. Your grandfather thought your father should only read Shakespeare and Richardson, and considered Dickens frivolous, just as your father thinks you ought to read Dickens instead of ‘The Sheik.’ And your grandfather told your father how superior the young men of his day were, and how they spent their time in improving their minds and always went to bed with the chickens, and how they doted on intellectual conversation, just as his father told him and great-great-great-great-grandfather told his son.

“And it is all stuff and nonsense. Not a word of it has ever been true. Each succeeding generation of young people have been pleasure-loving and laughter-loving and foolish, and have danced and played and skylarked. And all the difference is that their games have taken on different phases in different ages. It is a pity that fathers and mothers cannot remember this. If they did and would look on with sympathy and understanding, they could keep close enough to their children to know what they are doing and to stretch out a hand and hold them steady when they start to go wild, and to snatch them back when they get too near to the edge of the pit. For youth will be served. Youth must have its fling. High spirits must find a vent. Suppress these with the heavy hand of authority and something blows up.

“Lock a girl in her room, and she will climb out of the window. Forbid her to see boys at home, and she will meet them on the street. Refuse to let her go to nice dances, and she will slip away to low dance halls. The wildest and most reckless girls are invariably those with the strictest parents. The young people of to-day live in the world of to-day and must do as they do to-day. Parents must recognize that and deal with them on that platform if they wish to do their duty by their children.”

XLVII

LOSING A WIFE’S LOVE

One of the most curious superstitions in the world is the childlike belief that men have in the indestructibility of women’s love. They visualize the feminine heart as a sort of perpetual-motion machine that, once they press the button and set it to work, goes on automatically pumping up affection for them as long as they live, and they think that nothing they do or say ever interferes with its functioning. In a word, they believe that if a man wins a woman’s love it is his for keeps. He can’t lose it or mislay it. The poor thing has no choice but to go on adoring him to the end, because she is built that way. It is a comfortable and consoling theory, and men take liberties with it, but the trouble is that it isn’t true. In reality, women are just as fickle as men are, and just as few women as men are capable of a deep and abiding love. Women’s fancies are just as unstable as men’s. They are just as much lured by a handsome face and fall as easily for a smooth line of soft talk. And there are just as many wives who get tired of their husbands as there are husbands who are weary of their wives.

The only difference between the sexes in the matter is that women face the situation, while men shut their eyes to it and refuse to recognize that it exists. Every woman knows that because a man was in love with her when he married her is no indication that he is going to remain in love with her to the end of the chapter. She knows that if she keeps her husband’s affection she has to be up and doing, and on the job. That is why there are millions of women undergoing all the agonies of slow starvation trying to maintain a girlish figure; why millions are boiled alive and thumped and scalped in beauty parlors, and why the nation spends more a year for face paint than it does for house paint, and why, wherever we go, we see fat, middle-aged, bread-and-butter wives attempting to look like flappers and acquire the technique of the vamp in order to keep their husbands nailed to their own firesides.