Part 3

The husband was not one of the fortunate few who have the gift of making money. He worked hard, but opportunity does not smile on every man, and the wolf was never very far away from their door.

Women know the worst of poverty. It is the wife, who has the spending of the insufficient family income, who learns all the bitter ways of scrimping and paring and saving. The husband must present a decent appearance, for policy’s sake, when he goes to business; certain things are necessities for the children; and so the heaviest of all the deprivations fall upon the woman who stays at home and strives to make one dollar do the work of five.

That is the way of the Ordinary Woman; and what sacrifices she makes, what tastes she crucifies, what longings for pretty things and dainty things she smothers, not even her own family guess. They think it is an eccentricity that makes her choose the neck of the chicken and the hard end of the loaf and to stay at home from any little outing. Ah, if they only knew!

For each of her children she trod the Gethsemane of woman, only to go through that slavery of motherhood which the woman endures who is too poor to hire competent nurses. For years and years she never knew what it was to have a single night’s unbroken sleep. The small hours of the morning found her walking the colic, or nursing the croup, or covering restless little sleepers, or putting water to thirsty little lips.

There was no rest for her, day or night. There was always a child in her arms or clinging to her skirts. Oftener than not she was sick and nerve-worn and weary almost to death, but she never failed to rally to the call of “Mother!” as a good soldier rallies to his battle-cry.

Nobody called her brave, and yet, when one of the children came down with malignant diphtheria, she braved death a hundred times, in bending over the little sufferer, without one thought of danger. And when the little one was laid away under the sod, she who had loved most was the first to gather herself together and take up the burden of life for the others.

The supreme moment of the Ordinary Woman’s life, however, came when she educated her children above herself and lifted them out of her sphere. She did this with deliberation. She knew that in sending her bright boy and talented girl off to college she was opening up to them paths in which she could not follow; she knew that the time would come when they would look upon her with pitying tolerance or contempt, or perhaps—God help her!—be ashamed of her.

But she did not falter in her self-sacrifice. She worked a little harder, she denied herself a little more, to give them the advantages that she never had. In this she was only like millions of other Ordinary Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children—digging with their own hands the chasm that will separate them almost as much as death itself would.

Wherefore I say the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life.

IV

TEACH THE CHILDREN TO LOVE FATHER

Are you teaching your children to love and admire their father? Do you ceaselessly point out to your children their father’s good qualities? Do you hold their father up as a hero before your children’s eyes? Do you teach your children to appreciate their father? If you do not, you are not giving your husband a fair deal, nor a run for his money. Fatherhood calls for just as many sacrifices as motherhood does. The only coin in which these can be repaid is affection and gratitude, and if he is defrauded of these he is poor indeed.

From the time the first baby is born the average man becomes literally the slave of his family. He sells himself into bondage so that his children may live soft; that they may have advantages that he never had in his youth; that they may enjoy luxuries he never knew. He works overtime and grows prematurely old and bent, that his boys may go to college and belong to smart clubs and have automobiles, and that his daughters may attend fashionable schools, and dress like fashion plates, and go in the right circles.

It is father who stays at home and works through hot summers and cold winters, when the family goes to Europe. It is father who wears the shabbiest clothes. It is father who has the worst room and the smallest closet space in the home. The percentage of money that father spends on himself and in gratifying his own personal tastes and desires is negligible. Virtually all the money he has earned by a lifetime of hard toil has been lavished on his family.

Whether this pays or not, whether all of this labor and anxiety and self-denial have been worthless or not, depends altogether on his children’s attitude toward him. If they love him; if they are grateful to him; if they appreciate what he has done for them, it is the best investment that a man ever made, and it makes him richer than any millionaire. But if his children are indifferent and callous; if they take all that he has done for them as no more than their due, and without even a “thank you”; if they see in him nothing but a shabby little man who hasn’t been particularly successful as a moneymaker, then all his life work goes for nothing. His sacrifices are without reward. He is bankrupt in heart.

Now, the attitude of children toward their father is almost entirely determined by their mother; and whether they look upon him as a superior being to be adored and worshiped, or merely as a cash register that they can punch whenever they want any money, depends altogether upon what she has taught them. There are women who teach their children to hate and fear their father by making him an ogre to them. When the children are bad the little culprits are always threatened with what their father will do to them. The mother thus makes the father the hanging judge who inflicts punishment on the small sinners.

In this way the mother fills the child’s imagination with a picture of its father as of some dread creature who is always lying in wait to chastise him, and who could never have any sympathy or understanding with him, and with whom he could never have any possible companionship.

“I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home,” is the curse that millions of women lay between their children and their husbands, and that seals the children’s hearts forever against the fathers who have given them their very life blood.

There are other women who teach their children to regard their fathers simply as money-making machines that exist solely for their own use and benefit. What the children want they must have at any cost to father, and mother undertakes to nag it out of him. The children see that mother has no consideration for father and they grow up to have none.

She never tells them that they must not even ask for something they desire because business is bad and their father is harassed and worried about money. She never tells them that they must stay at home and let father have a little trip, because he is sick and nerve-worn. She lets them wring the last penny out of him with no more feeling for him than if he were some sort of automatic device worked by her for supplying their desires and needs.

Other women teach their children to despise their fathers by always criticizing them and calling attention to their faults. They are forever telling the children that their fathers are lacking in enterprise, that they are poor business men, that they are too easy and let people take advantage of them, that they are high-tempered and hard to get along with, that they have this and that weakness, until the child’s mind is thoroughly poisoned with the idea that his father amounts to nothing and his opinions are not to be respected.

Very few women ever deliberately set themselves to teach their children to love and appreciate their fathers. Very few women ever try to make their children see their fathers as heroes who, for their sakes, are fighting the battle of life as bravely and gallantly as any knight of old. Very few women teach their children to show any gratitude to the fathers who have sacrificed so much for them. Why so many women fail in this important duty is partly through carelessness and a lack of thought, but mostly because of an unconscious mother jealousy. They want to be first with their children and monopolize their love. But it is a cruel thing to the child, and to the father. It robs them both of so much joy in each other that they miss.

V

STRIKE A BALANCE WITH MATRIMONY

I get hundreds upon hundreds of letters from disgruntled wives bemoaning their fates. They tell me that they are sick and weary of the monotony of domestic drudgery; that they have few amusements; that their husbands are indifferent to them and never pay them any compliments or show them any affection; that their husbands find fault with them for their every mistake, but never give them one word of praise for all the good work they do.

And these women have brooded over the hardships of their lot until they have grown morbid and they see the world as one great gob of gloom, with themselves as the blackest spot in it.

Without doubt, marriage is a cruel and a bitter disappointment to nine-tenths of those who enter into the holy estate. Especially is it disillusioning to women because they build such impossible hopes upon it, and go into it with such a blind faith that they are going to find it an earthly paradise.

It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her lifelong knowledge of the daily life her mother has led and her observation of the domestic strife in the households of her married friends and neighbors, every girl honestly believes that her own matrimonial venture will be a perpetual picnic, and that the man she marries will remain the perfect lover.

Of course, it doesn’t happen, and when the woman finds out that her own marriage brings her more kicks than ha’pence; when she realizes that she must share the common lot; when she has to bend her back to the hard and dreary labor of making a family comfortable, for which she gets neither the glad hand nor a pay envelope, and when she has to put up with a man who seems to have cornered the whole visible supply of pure cussedness, why, it gets upon her nerves, and she feels like flunking it.

So she beats upon her breast and cries out that this is not the marriage of which she dreamed. This sordid existence is not what she married for.

Of course, it isn’t. But it is marriage as it is. None of us realize our ideals. Our dreams never come true. And even when we get what we want, it is so warped and twisted that it is no longer the object of our desires, and we have paid for it more than it is worth. That is life.

To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of homely counsel:

Sit down, sisters, and have a real heart-to-heart session with your own souls. Put out of your mind firmly and for all time the idiotic idea that there is any lot of perfect peace and happiness, any road you might have traveled that is not strewn with tacks. Worry and anxiety and sickness and sorrow and disappointment and loneliness are the portion alike of the highest and the lowest, and you cannot escape the human lot. It is life.

Then take a calm and dispassionate survey of your own situation. You will find your work tiresome and monotonous. So does every other person in the world find his or hers. The thing we do for our daily bread is bound to become a grind. Do you think for a moment that the banker doesn’t get sick and weary of grappling with credits and loans; that the author doesn’t have to flog himself to his desk; that the actor doesn’t weary of the lines he has said over thousands of times; that the film star is not nauseated with grease paint?

Every one thrills to his task at first as you did to your new pots and pans and bridal furniture. But the novelty wears off, and then comes the long, grim stretch of carrying on, because it is your job to which you have set your hand and which you mean to make a good job just because it is yours. That is life.

You complain that your husband takes your good work as a matter of course, but he howls loud and long over your mistakes. That is what happens to all workers. If you were a stenographer and spelled one word wrong; if you were a saleswoman and made one error in your calculations, your boss would pass over the thousands of words you had spelled correctly and the hundreds of good sales you had made, to call you down for your blunder.

If you were a writer or an actor, you would find that the critics would forget all the good work you had done to call attention to the weakness of your new book, or bemoan the performance you gave in a new part. As long as we walk straight no one notices it, but when we fall off the path we attract attention. It is life.

These unhappy wives ask, “What shall I do?” and one knows not how to answer the question. To tell them that, if they are patient and forbearing, and go on doing their duty as wives, they can change mean husbands into good ones is to tell them a wicked lie, and mislead them with false hopes. The leopard changes his spots just about as often as a man does his disposition, and I have yet to see the tightwad become generous; the surly, glum man turn into a ray of sunshine in his home; or the hard, cold, selfish man become the perfect lover to his wife.

Nor is divorce the solution of the unhappy wife’s problem. Marriage is not an episode of which you can say when you get a divorce, “This unpleasant chapter of my life is ended. I will shut the book, and forget all about it, and be perfectly happy henceforth.” Marriage sets its ineffaceable seal upon a woman, it colors her whole life; and divorce can no more give her back her lost joy, and faith, and trust, than it can restore her lost girlhood.

Besides, there are nearly always children to consider; children whose welfare a good mother places above her own; children for whom a home must be kept together; children who must be educated; who must be started in life, who need a father’s support and control. Divorce is not for the woman with children unless conditions are absolutely intolerable. And for the woman herself divorce is often a jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for when she finds that she is rid of an unkind husband, she has to face a world that is unkinder still. Generally the woman has no private fortune. The courts award her but a meager alimony, and the collecting of that is generally about the hardest job on earth. She is trained to no business or occupation. Nobody wants her services, and she comes to know that the grumbling of an ill-tempered husband is no harder to endure than the howl of the wolf outside of her door.

Perhaps the best advice that one can offer these unhappy wives is to try to forget what they expected of marriage, and to just put it on a business basis, so much for so much, with a settled determination to make the best of a bad bargain. Their little flier in Heart’s Consolidated hasn’t paid the dividends they expected it to. Well, our speculations seldom do. Their matrimonial partners have proved hard to get along with. Well, many business men endure cranky men partners, who rasp their nerves, for the sake of the good of the firm.

And on the credit side of the ledger the unhappy wife can set this down, that she has, at least, her home, and her settled position in society, and they are great gain. It takes years and years of struggle and striving for the lone woman to reach the goal where she can have her own house, and gather about her the household gods that women worship, and that bless one by their presence.

I am not arguing that a woman would consider a house, no matter if it were a palace, a satisfactory substitute for a tender, loving husband, but I am trying to induce the woman who has an indifferent husband to realize that she is not half as badly off as she thinks she is, as long as she has her creature comforts.

Fortunately, the law of compensation always holds. The man who is a poor husband is often a good provider. Flirtatious husbands often atone for their sidesteppings with diamonds and furs. Stingy ones leave women rich widows. Even grouches leave their wives free to amuse themselves in their own way. After all, life is a series of compromises. If we don’t get the best, we are very foolish to throw away the second best and the wise woman who finds marriage a failure doesn’t go into physical and spiritual bankruptcy. She gets the best out of what she has. She makes the most of her bargain.

All of which just boils down into this: Dry your eyes on your best embroidered towels, O ye disgruntled sisters, and realize that you are not so unfortunate as you think you are, and what you are called upon to bear is just life.

VI

JEALOUSY

A woman wants to know if there is any cure for jealousy. She says that she knows her husband loves her devotedly. He is true and faithful to her. He is as domesticated as the house cat and casts no roving eye at the pretty flappers. Nevertheless, every time he speaks to another woman she endures grinding torments of suspicion.

There is only one cure for jealousy. That is to use a little common sense, but this puts the remedy out of the reach of the green-eyed, because jealousy is a form of insanity.

It is a lack of mental balance that makes people imagine things that do not exist, that causes them to see deep, dark plots in the most innocent acts and that makes them deliberately torture themselves by believing that the ones that they love most are traitors to them. Also, it is what the alienists call “the exaggerated ego” that makes any man or woman believe that he or she can supply another individual’s whole need of human companionship.

For jealousy isn’t confined solely to lovers. Some of the most acute attacks are the jealousy that men and women feel for their in-laws. Sometimes parents are even jealous of their own children. Wives are often jealous of their husband’s business, and always jealous of the old friends of their bachelor days. But however and wherever it is, and no matter how causeless and needless it may be, jealousy poisons the life and ruins the happiness of all of those who indulge in it. It is the source of endless quarrels between husbands and wives, and it slays love quicker than any other one thing. Indeed, the jealous bring down the curse they fear upon their own heads.

By their suspicions the jealous materialize the very thing they most dread, for there is no surer way of driving a man or a woman into philandering than by keeping dangling continually before his or her eyes a romantic possibility in which he or she is likely to indulge at any moment. Many a married man would never think of himself as a lady-killer—in fact, he would consider that he was married and settled, and done with sentimental episodes, except that his wife keeps alive his belief in himself as a heart-smasher by her jealousy. If she considers him so fascinating that she is afraid to let him have a casual conversation with another woman, or take a turn around a ballroom floor with a pretty girl, he argues that he must be some sheik. And so he buys him some Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes and sets his hat on the side of his head and proceeds to justify her once groundless suspicions.

Furthermore, jealousy is its own undoing, because it strikes a death blow at our personal liberty, which is dearer to us and more necessary to our happiness than any man or woman ever is. None of us likes to be called upon to furnish an alibi. None of us enjoys being put through a questionnaire about everything that was said to us and everything we said. None of us but resents not being free to go and come as we like within reasonable bounds and to hold ordinary social intercourse with any one we choose. So if husbands and wives went about deliberately to kill every particle of affection that their mates have for them, they could take no better way to do it than by spying upon them, by attributing unworthy motives to them, by curtailing their freedom and by making such jealous scenes that, for the sake of peace, they are forced to lie and deceive. Besides, jealousy is an unforgivable insult.

There are women who have conniption fits every time their husbands make themselves agreeable to their dinner partners or take a chance-met old woman friend out to lunch. There are wives who never believe that their husbands can admire a beautiful woman or enjoy the society of a brilliant one innocently. They attribute the basest motives to the men they love and accuse them not only of being faithless, but of the grossest animalism, which was far and away from the thoughts of the poor gentlemen.