Part 18

“And I have found that a man is a fool who lies to his wife. In the end she always catches up with him, and then she imagines things ten times worse than they were. If a man telephones his wife that he is going to stay downtown and meet a customer from Oshkosh and she learns that he really played poker with the boys she pictures a scene of wild debauchery and leaps to the conclusion that he is leading the double life and he never hears the last of it. But if he tells her just what he is going to do she is so flattered at being trusted and thought broadminded enough not to begrudge her husband an evening’s pleasure that she goes to bed and goes to sleep instead of waiting up for him with a curtain lecture sizzling in her mind.

“Marriage has taught me that women think more of words than they do of deeds and that a woman would rather have her husband tell her that he loves her than to have him work his fingers to the bone for her and never make her a soft speech. As long as a husband tells his wife how beautiful she is and how he would like to deck her out in diamonds and sables she is perfectly content to do without them and wear hand-me-downs. It is only when she thinks that he doesn’t care whether she has fine clothes or not that she gets peevish over not having the finery that other women have.

“Marriage has taught me that in the family circle the hammer is a boomerang that returns and annihilates the hammerer. If you knock your wife’s cooking she says, ‘What’s the use of trying to please you?’ and makes no effort to improve; but if you praise her dinners she breaks her neck trying to make them better and better. If you criticize the size of the bills she revenges herself by buying something that really cost money; but if you tell her what a help she is to you and what a marvelous manager, she becomes a nickel-nurser.

“If you find fault with her hat or her dress, you have to buy her a new one; but if you tell her how becoming her last year’s costume is and how it brings out her lines, she will wear it into shreds. Marriage has taught me that if you let your wife know that you admire her and appreciate her, that you are grateful to her for all that she does for you and that you try to do all in your power to make her happy, she will repay you a thousandfold and there is nothing she won’t do for you and no fault she won’t overlook in you.”

LIX

THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN

The other day a man killed his beautiful young wife because she was a better “business man” than he was and made more money. The woman loved her husband and was good to him. She was ambitious for him. She got him a job with the people for whom she worked and tried to push him along and help him in every way. But it simply was not in him to be the go-getter that she was. She was a success and he was a failure. And in the frenzy of morbid jealousy that this engendered in him, he slew her.

Thus vividly do we have brought to our attention one of the new difficulties that the advent of women into the business world has injected into the already complicated matrimonial proposition. It makes the question of how the modern wife can best be a helpmeet to her husband one that takes a Solomon in petticoats to answer. In olden times the matter was perfectly simple. The woman who wanted to help her husband along had only to be a good and thrifty manager, to pare the potatoes thin enough and squeeze the nickels. She did her part in building up the family fortunes by saving. But, in many cases to-day, the old woman’s granddaughter is a crackerjack business woman who sees that she can help her husband more by earning than by scrimping, and that she can make more money in one year in business than she could save in ten years by doing her own housework and wearing shabby clothes. So, as long as she is working for their common good, the woman cannot understand why her husband shouldn’t be just as willing for her to help him by working in an office as in a kitchen, or why the wife who does brain labor isn’t as good a wife as the one who does manual labor.

But the great majority of women who continue to follow any gainful pursuit after marriage find out that, while there is a new woman who looks at everything in life from a new angle, there is no new man. Women have changed in their relationship to man, but men stand pat just where Adam did when it comes to dealing with women.

If you will notice, it is only women who prate about equality between the sexes. Men take no stock in any such heresy. When a man tells a woman that she is an angel and that he looks up to her and worships her, it is one of the lover’s perjuries at which Jove laughs. In reality he doesn’t mean a word of it. The very basic thing on which a man’s love for a woman is built is his sense of superiority to her. He wants to feel stronger than she is, wiser than she is, to be more successful than she is. She must look up to him, revere him, ask his opinion, be guided by his advice.

That is why the clinging-vine type of woman is so appealing to men, and it is why intelligent, big-brained men so often marry morons and are happy and contented with them. Their silly little wives do not understand one word in five they say and are no companions to them, but they satisfy the masculine demand to dominate the woman. When the case is reversed, as it often is, and when the wife is the more intelligent, the stronger character—when the gray mare is the better horse and pulls most of the load—the marriage is invariably unhappy, and the husband almost invariably either openly or secretly hates his wife. His love for her is never strong enough to survive the hurt to his vanity. His sense of inferiority to her keeps his nerves raw, and if he is dependent upon her it turns his very soul to wormwood and gall. I have never known a woman who supported her husband who received any gratitude for it. He would eat her bread, but he did it as a snapping dog that bites the hand that feeds it.

There is nothing that fills a woman’s cup of happiness so full and overflowing as for her husband to achieve a notable success and be great and famous. She glories in being Mrs. Explorer or Mrs. Engineer or Mrs. Banker or Mrs. Author, and loves to shine in the reflected glory. But the deadliest insult you can offer any man is to speak of him as his wife’s husband and call him Mr. Mary Smith, although Mary may have written the book of the year or have performed some achievement that has made the world sit up and take notice of her.

Perhaps all of this is natural. Perhaps this cosmic urge that the male has to dominate the female is something instinctive for which he is not responsible.

But it makes the woman’s course a hard one to steer, for, curiously enough, the weak man is often attracted to the strong woman, and there is something maternal in the strong woman that wants to mother the weak man and makes her feel that he only needs her to take care of him and boost him and show him the way to success.

So the girl who is making a big salary marries the man who is making a small one, and she tries to supply for him the business sense he lacks and to galvanize him into a hustle of which he is incapable, and they live scrappily ever afterward. Yet there is nothing we can do about it as long as nature goes blundering along putting the brains and talents of merchants and bankers and trust presidents into a lot of women’s heads and making plenty of men who would have been wonderful housekeepers and done perfectly lovely embroidery work if only they hadn’t got the wrong sex.

LX

NEW IDEALS FOR OLD

The strangest thing in this age of strange things is the new relationship that is growing up between the sexes. So many of the ideals that have ruled us for centuries have been scrapped and swept into the discard that the boy and girl babies of to-day are virtually born into a new world where few of the conventions that ruled their parents survive. Take the matter of financial independence, for instance. Since the caveman days it has been held that the proper attitude of woman was one of dependence on her lord and master. The woman bore the children and kept the house, and the husband provided the wherewithal to support the family. When a woman had property her husband took possession of it on the day they were married. Virtually every lucrative occupation was barred to women. When a man and a woman went to any place of amusement the man would have been highly insulted if she had offered to pay any part of the cost of the entertainment. Man was the purse bearer, and his lordly gesture indicated that he had the checking account of Mr. Rockefeller and that woman was a dear little sweetie who was not to bother her poor little foolish head over the cost of anything.

To-day the majority of women earn their living before they are married. Financial independence has become so necessary to their happiness that one of the potent sources of domestic discord is the inability of the woman who has had her own pay envelope to do without it and reconcile herself to taking whatever her husband gives her as recompense for her hard work as a poor man’s wife. Also husbands are coming more and more to begrudge spending money on their wives and are demanding oftener and oftener that the wage-earning girls they marry shall keep on with their jobs. Likewise, it is a common thing for the young women who go out with young men to places of amusement to pay their own way and go fifty-fifty on all expenses.

This may be fair enough. Certainly, when men and women work side by side and the woman gets the same salary as the man there is no more reason why he should feed her and buy her theater tickets than why she should buy his. Perhaps it is only logical that when woman fought for and won financial independence she should have to pay the price of her victory. But what I am trying to show is that man’s attitude toward woman as regards money has changed. She has shown that she can make her own living and he lets her do it. Even fathers have now no such sense of responsibility about providing for their daughters as they used to have. Men no longer adopt the gallant “I’ll-pay-your-way” pose. They treat women about money as they would treat another man. Of course, the occupation of wifehood and motherhood is a strenuous one and is all that any woman can be expected to do properly, but it is becoming more and more evident that men are less willing to support their families and that in the future women are going to have to continue to be wage-earners even after they are married.

Another curious shift of masculine thought is about feminine modesty. In the past, no matter what a man’s own life might have been, he demanded unsullied innocence in the woman he married. His ideal was the shrinking violet, the bud with the dew upon it. In these days there are few peaches with the down still left upon them. They have nearly all been manhandled. Girls display their bodies with an abandon that would have made the most hardened woman blush fifty years ago. Debutantes tell stories that would paralyze their grandmothers if they could hear them. Young women think no more of kissing every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes along and in indulging in petting parties and “necking,” than their mothers would have thought of shaking hands and holding a casual conversation. Girls excuse themselves for indulging in these dangerous and degrading practises by saying that unless they do they receive no attention from men. They speak the truth. Men may still theoretically admire what they call “the old-fashioned girl,” but they leave her to spend her evenings with her parents. Few men in these days can hope to marry a girl who has not been kissed and pawed over, and so it is obvious that men are changing their opinions about the desirability of modesty in women and establishing a single standard of conduct for both sexes. That is just, but it does not make for morality or the uplift of humanity.

Men and women both approach marriage in a different spirit. In the back of most young people’s heads as they march to the altar is the thought that if they don’t like it they won’t stick to it. It is an experiment, and they will try anything once, and if it doesn’t come up to what the novelists and poets have press-agented it to be they can always fly to the divorce court. That is one reason why marriage is so often a failure. Neither husband nor wife makes an honest effort to make a success of it. Of course, there are exceptions to all rules. There are husbands who gladly support their families; there are girls who have kept themselves unsullied and their lips virginal; there are men and women who still hold marriage a sacrament. But for the great majority of men and women there are new ideals and a new attitude toward each other. And whether these are better or worse than the old only time can tell.

LXI

WHY DIVORCE IS COMMON

When we hear about a couple getting a divorce on the grounds of incompatibility of temper we instinctively feel that it is too trivial a reason for breaking up a home and we condemn them as poor sports who did not have enough grit to carry on and make the best of their bargain. If it had been something big, now—drunkenness, the drug habit, infidelity—if the husband had been a brute who beat his wife, or the wife a virago, we could have sympathized with them. But just to get a divorce because they didn’t think alike on politics and religion and hadn’t the same taste in pie. Pooh! Quitters. A yellow streak. We’ve no pity for them.

Yet when you come to think of it, is there really anything else in the whole wide world that comes so near to justifying divorce as incompatibility of temper? Is there any other such good reason for a man and woman parting and going their separate ways as the fact that they have not one thought or desire or interest in common? And is there any other torture comparable with having to live in intimate daily contact with a person who continually rubs your fur the wrong way, who gets on your nerves, who rasps your sensibilities and keeps you in a perpetual bad humor? It is a lot easier to forgive an occasional big fault than it is to put up with never-ending petty irritations. The big sinners at least take a day off from their vices now and then, but the little sinners who sin against our habits and ideals and conventions are always on the job. So when you think of this and consider the difficulties there are in the way of every man and woman who get married adjusting themselves to each other, you are not surprised that divorce is so common. You only wonder that it isn’t universal.

Here are two persons of different sexes, doomed by nature to look at everything from different standpoints and to react differently to every situation. Back of them is a different heredity, often a different race. In their veins flow alien currents of blood. They have been brought up with different standards, in different schools of thought. Different habits have been bred in them. They worship different gods and at different altars and eat different dishes.

What marvel that such a couple come to grief on the rocks of incompatibility of temper! The miracle of it is that any of them have the wit and wisdom to steer around it. But the terrible and pathetic thing about it is that in hundreds of these cases in which husbands and wives live a cat-and-dog life and make each other perfectly miserable, or else break their marriage vows, nobody is really to blame. Each is perfectly right from his or her standpoint, only they can’t agree. They can’t adjust themselves to each other. The woman who has been brought up in a happy-go-lucky household, where the only use any one saw for a dollar was to spend it as quickly as possible, where meals were movable feasts that were as likely to happen at one hour as another, is a thorn in the side of a husband who has been trained from his youth up to make a fetich of thrift, order and promptness.

On the other hand, the woman whose mother has brought her up to make a sacred rite of cleanliness and who scrubs the back of every kitchen shelf and regards a chair out of place or ashes on the rug as a high crime and misdemeanor, is fretted into nervous prostration by a husband who never can be taught to wipe his feet on the doormat or kept from mussing up the best sofa cushion.

There are women who die of broken hearts, frozen to death by the coldness of their husbands. They have come from warm-hearted, demonstrative families. They have been accustomed to having a fuss made over them and to seeing their father’s loverlike attentions to their mother, and they think that their husbands do not love them, because they never tell them so. They cannot understand the dumb, repressed temperament that is utterly incapable of showing what it feels. Then there is the gay, pleasure-loving man who likes to dance and dine in restaurants and jazz; the good fellow whom everybody likes and who has holes in his pockets that no wife’s economy can ever sew up. What superhuman wisdom and patience it takes in a woman to keep from nagging him if she has been brought up in an austere family that frowned on all frivolous amusements and whose watchword was duty instead of good times!

Then there is the eternal conflict over little trivial personal habits and ways, over things as small as cooking. Irvin Cobb said once that the Civil War was fought not over secession or slavery but over hot bread and cold bread. Certainly many thirty or forty-year family wars are waged over what strength the breakfast coffee shall be and the use of onions in the soup. And certainly it is no trivial matter for one accustomed to a sophisticated, highly cultured cuisine to have to insult your palate with plain, ignorant, boiled food because the partner of your bosom has had his or her early education in eating neglected. Probably no woman who has been reared in the belief that one’s good clothes should be kept for company and that any sort of old messy duds were good enough for home consumption can realize the disgust she inspires in her husband’s breast when she comes down to breakfast in a boudoir cap and a soiled kimono and no complexion if he is of the fastidious sort to whom slovenliness is a mortal sin.

These little things—the niceties of life that one has been taught to observe and the other hasn’t, the order and thrift one has been bred to and the other hasn’t, the difference in point of view, in taste, in habit—make the inevitable friction between husbands and wives which is at the bottom of almost every divorce. And when you think how hard it is to give up our old opinions and ways of doing things, the wonder is that so many persons are able to do it and that so many couples do adjust themselves to each other and get along in reasonable peace and harmony.

LXII

THE CHILDREN PAY

No disinterested outsider ever observes the spats in which so many husbands and wives continually engage without realizing that they quarrel because they enjoy doing so. It is an indoor sport out of which they get a morbid thrill. Domestic life has become dull and monotonous to them. They have nothing new and interesting to say to each other, and so one or the other starts something by making a remark that he or she knows is the fighting word that will inevitably precipitate a scrimmage. And then they go to it, hammer and tongs. It is their way of putting pep into a pepless day, for they know the danger they are running, and the very fact that they are risking their whole life’s happiness crisps their nerves, as going over the top did the soldiers in the war. Besides which they get a strange and savage joy out of stabbing with cruel words and in wounding and being wounded by the ones they love and who love them.

It is because married couples love a fight for the fight’s sake that so many homes are nothing but a battlefield on which a perpetual warfare goes on. Otherwise the dove of peace would roost on the roof of many a household to which the black flag is now nailed. For it is folly to say that the average husband and wife who are forever engaged in an acrimonious debate over every trifle that comes up could not get along with each other if they desired to do so. They get along with other persons. They make allowance for the prejudices and faults of others. They permit other persons to differ from them on matters of opinion and taste. They sidestep other persons’ peculiarities. They control their tempers and their tongues when they are dealing with others. They are tactful and diplomatic in handling other persons. No doctor would ever have another patient, no merchant another customer, no man could hold his job if he was as irritable, as grouchy, as high tempered abroad as many a man is at home, and if he said the insulting things to other persons that he says to his wife. No woman would ever be invited to another bridge party or elected president of the sewing society if she were as much of a spitfire in public as many a woman is in private, and if she said the nasty things to others that she says to her husband.