Part 4

Finally, jealousy is an indication of the inferiority complex. The woman who is jealous of all other women in her heart believes them all her superiors. She believes them better looking, more intelligent, more charming, with more attraction for her husband than she has. That is why she is so afraid of their getting him away from her. You can’t imagine a queen being jealous of a milkmaid or a Lillian Russell being jealous of an ugly duckling, or a star dancer not being willing to have her husband to tread a measure with some lump of a girl who would walk all over his feet. All of this being true, then, the way to cure jealousy is to apply common sense to the situation. Try to look at it fairly and squarely. In the first place, your husband or wife wouldn’t have married you if he or she hadn’t preferred you to every one else in the world. If you had charm before marriage you have it still, if you will take the trouble to use it. In the second place, you know that you enjoy talking to other people, and that your contact with them is perfectly harmless. Why not believe your husband or wife is as decent as you are? In the third place, why keep your husband or wife always fed up with the idea that he or she is a fascinator that no woman or man can resist? It makes them want to try and see if they can stand them up. And lastly, if you are married to a man or woman whom you believe to have so little truth and honor, and who cares so little for you that he or she can’t be trusted out of your sight, why worry about him or about her? He or she isn’t worth a single pang of jealousy.

VII

HAVE A GOAL

The great trouble with the majority of women is that they have no plan of life, no real objective. They are the victims of fads. They wobble about from interest to interest. The thing they were crazy about yesterday they throw into the discard to-day. They waste their time, and energy, and ability in pursuing will-o’-the-wisps. Like the hero of the popular song, they are on their way, but they don’t know where they are going.

This is why so many women fail, as is abundantly proved by the fact that when a woman does make up her mind about what she wants to do, when she has one settled ambition instead of a lot of vague desires, she is almost invariably successful. Let her once determine to tread a definite path and she not only arrives, but she arrives with bells on.

Of course, the reason that women tackle the business of existence in this hit-or-miss fashion is not really their fault, poor dears. It is because of the idiotic way in which we bring up girls on the assumption that each one has a regiment of fairy godmothers and guardian angels looking after her and taking care of her, so that she doesn’t need to bother her pretty little head about learning how to take care of herself. So we don’t teach a girl, as we do a boy, that our lives are just what we make them, that we are the architects of our own fate, and that whether our lives are ugly, and botchy, and of little worth, or beautiful, and well-rounded, and valuable, depends upon our having some plan of life in our heads and working to it.

We tell the boy that he who is jack-of-all-trades is good at none, and that if he wishes to be a carpenter, or a master plumber, or a bank president, or a surgeon, he must serve his apprenticeship in his chosen trade or profession and concentrate on the study of it if he means to succeed. He will never get anywhere as long as he goes from job to job and dabbles first at one thing and then at another. But we don’t teach girls that it is just as important for them to have some definite plan of life and prepare themselves to do some particular work as it is for their brothers. Most girls in these days have to earn their own living until they are married. But most of them do just as little work as they can get by with, and they do this little aimlessly.

Here and there is a stenographer who works by a plan. She has set herself to become a highly paid private secretary. Here and there is a shop-girl who has her eye on a buyer’s job and trips to Europe. Here and there is a milliner or a dressmaker whose dream is of her own shop. Here and there is a boarding-house keeper whose ambition it is to run a hotel. Very seldom do these women fail to attain their desires. They know what they are trying to do and they make every lick of work count. They bend every energy to one end instead of wasting it on a hundred ineffectual endeavors. They put their backs, their hearts, their brains into their work and that combination invariably spells success.

But the great majority of working women simply potter purposelessly along. They don’t expect to do what they are doing very long, and so they don’t take the trouble to try to learn how to do it well. They have no interest in their work, no ambition. They haven’t even bothered to pick out the thing to do for which they have a natural aptitude. They have taken up the occupation they follow just because they happened to do so. They don’t give a single lobe of their brain to studying it or trying to fit themselves to be competent. They take life as casually as that. Yet they may have to do this same work for thirty or forty years, for it is by no means certain that every girl will get a husband or that the husband will be able to support her if she does get him.

Women do not even have any plan about following the great career of wifehood and motherhood to which they all look forward. Probably every girl who goes to the altar desires to be a good wife and mother. But she does not crystallize these vague intentions into any concrete plan of action. Not one woman in a thousand sits down in her bridal bungalow or apartment and works out a scheme for handling her husband without friction, for running her house economically and for making her marriage a success. On the contrary, she trusts it all to luck. If she is a good housekeeper, she feeds her husband well. If she doesn’t like to cook, she gives him dyspepsia by sitting him down to dinners of underdone meat and overdone bread and watery vegetables. If she is amiable and good-natured, she gets along with him. If she is high tempered, she rows with him. If she is thrifty, she saves his money and they prosper. If she is extravagant, she runs him into debt.

It is because wives have no plan about what they do as wives that matrimony is such a gamble. And it is the same way about motherhood. There is no other thought in the world so terrible as that mothers bring up their children without any plan about what they are trying to make them. They are shaping an immortal soul, and they don’t even know what they are trying to make of it. That is the capital crime of aimlessness. Women will never succeed until they conquer this weakness and learn how to plan their lives. You cannot do anything effectively unless you know what you are trying to do.

VIII

THE GOAT FAMILY

Kind reader, meet my friends, the Goats. They are not rich, for, altho Mr. Goat has been an able and energetic business man all his life, and Mrs. Goat has been a thrifty housekeeper, they have never been able to get much ahead because they have always had such a horde of parasites to support. Ever since they had a home they have run a free hotel. They have literally been eaten out of house and home by self-invited guests, by forty-seventh cousins who always cashed in the blood relationship for board and lodging, and by old friends who suddenly remembered, when they happened to be in their town, how they loved the Goats and hated to pay for their own beds and meals.

Any one of their many acquaintances who wished to take a vacation without expense, or have an operation performed, or go to the opera, or see the sights of the city, just wished himself or herself on the Goats, and arrived bag and baggage to camp in the spare bedroom. And that was all there was to it; a pleasant and economical arrangement so far as the guests were concerned. And if it was inconvenient to the Goats and they had to sleep around on cots and do without new clothes to pay for the food that the deadbeats gobbled up, why, nobody bothered about that. And the Goats never complained. They never made a move to chuck these grafters out, not even rich Cousin Susan, who could have bought the family up a hundred times over, when she came and stayed six months, wore Mother Goat to a frazzle waiting on her and ran them into debt because she couldn’t eat anything but the most expensive foods. No, they feel that it would be a stain on their escutcheon to assert themselves and look out for themselves a little, and so they lived up to the Goat coat-of-arms, which is a doormat couchant, with everybody trampling over it.

By and by the eldest Miss Goat got married. Her husband proved to be a bumptious, egotistical, opinionated fellow, and when he was about the whole Goat family had to walk on eggs and suppress all their own opinions and tastes to avoid irritating him. Indeed, when their daughter married, the Goats acquired a new son, as the phrase goes, because every Sunday and on high days and holidays the young couple arrived to take dinner with papa and mamma. It was so sweet to be all together at such times, and it was also so economical and saved them the work and worry of getting their own dinner. Then the son Billy got married. Not being born a Goat, Billy’s wife had not the suffer-and-be-strong complex in her. On the contrary, she was a go-getter, and what she wanted she had to have. Therefore, Father Goat was often called on for money to help pay Mrs. Billy’s bills, which had to be met regardless of what sacrifice it entailed on the Goats at home.

Mrs. Billy died, and, of course, Billy took his motherless children, one of them a tiny baby, back home for mother and sister to take care of. They did it for a few years, until Billy married again, altho it reduced poor, worn-out mother to a physical wreck. The family didn’t approve of Billy’s choice of a second wife, but, with the Goat faculty for swallowing anything, they accepted her and felt that at least one burden would be removed from them and that Billy would take his children and set up his own home.

It appears, however, that the second wife refuses to be bothered with stepchildren, and so Billy has brought his brood back for mother and sister to rear and support. It takes all the money he can make to provide for his wife and her relatives whom she has saddled upon him.

Mother Goat says that no sacrifice is too great to make for her darling son, nor does she hesitate to offer up as a burnt offering her unmarried daughter, Nanny Goat, who labors in an office all day to make the money to help maintain the family, and who comes home at night and does most of the housework.

But Nanny is beginning to show un-Goatlike traits. She doesn’t see why she should work to feed a lot of bum company who sponge on them instead of paying their own board somewhere. She doesn’t see why she should spend her Sundays and holidays, cooking dinners for sister and brother and the in-laws when they might just as well eat at home or go to a restaurant. And she doesn’t see what right brother has to foist the care of his children and their support on his old parents and his young sister.

“I am spending my life slaving for other people and bearing other people’s burdens,” wails poor little Nanny Goat. “I earn a good salary, but I can never have any pretty clothes or indulge myself in any of the amusements I crave, because all my money is spent on people who just make a convenience of us, and who think more of being invited somewhere else to tea than they do of living on us without cost for a month. All my youth, when I ought to have the pleasures of the young, is being given to trying to raise my brother’s children, and do for them the things that he himself is too weak and pusillanimous to do. And I am sick and tired of it. I am tired of supporting grafters that are more able to work than I am. I am sick of being bled white by blood-suckers. I am sore at having to do other people’s duty for them, and I want to know how I can get out of being a perpetual Goat as long as I live.”

Alas! poor little Nanny, it is easier for the leopard to change its spots than it is for one who was born a Goat to cease being one. Still, the thing can be done, if you have nerve enough to butt your way to freedom. Shut the door in the face of the deadbeat visitors. Make your brother act the part of a man and assume his own responsibilities. And you will find that you have gained not only relief but that you have gone up a hundred per cent in every one’s esteem.

For while we all make use of the Goat family, we hold them in contempt because they let us make goats of them.

IX

SPOILING A WIFE

A man asks: “Can a husband be too good to his wife?” Yes. A husband can be too good to his wife. So can a wife be too good to her husband. Husbands and wives are just as easily spoiled as babies are, and they react to spoiling exactly the same way that babies do. They become peevish, and fretful, and unreasonable. They howl for the moon. The more they are given in to, the more they demand and the more unrelenting their tyranny becomes. They smash things in sheer wantonness, and they need nothing on earth so much as to be turned across somebody’s knee and given a good spanking, and made to behave themselves.

All of us know plenty of men and women, with many fine and noble qualities, who would have made splendid husbands and wives if they had not been badly spoiled by their overindulgent wives and husbands. But instead of being disciplined, and forced to control themselves, and made to act like reasonable human beings, they had their weaknesses indulged, their selfishness encouraged, their exactions given in to, until they became a curse to themselves and to those who had the misfortune to be married to them.

Of course, when my correspondent speaks of a man being “good” to his wife, he means it in the sense of being indulgent to her. No man can be too good to his wife in the way of being kind, and tender, and sympathetic, and just, and fair to her. But he is not good to her—in fact, he does her a cruel wrong—when he is overly indulgent to her. He ruins her life no less than his own because the spoiled wife is never happy. She is always discontented, restless, dissatisfied, wanting something she hasn’t got and that is just beyond her reach. She thinks only of herself, and her pleasures, and the self-centered can always find flaws in their lot. The only contented wives are those who are doing their part toward making their marriage a success. The grafting wives are always whiny, and complaining, and disgruntled.

A man, for instance, is too good to his wife when he lets her lie down on her end of the matrimonial partnership. His part of the contract is to work and make the money to support a home. Her part is to make a comfortable home. There are many women who refuse to do this, and who force their husbands to live around in boarding houses and hotels. There are many more women who are so lazy and shiftless that they keep their houses as dirty as pigstys, and never give their husbands a meal that isn’t a first-aid to the undertaker. There are men who have to get up and get their own breakfasts before they start to business, while their good-for-nothing wives slumber and sleep. There are men who have to come home after a hard day’s work and help get the dinner, and wash the dishes, and bathe the baby, and sweep the floors, and do all the housework that their trifling wives have left undone.

Nothing but being a bedridden invalid excuses a woman for not doing her share of the work and for not feeding her family on properly cooked food, and any man is very silly who puts up with slack housekeeping from an able-bodied wife. She would get busy quickly enough with the broom and the cookbook if she knew she would lose her job unless she made her man comfortable.

A man is too good to his wife—or too bad to her—when he lets her ruin him with her extravagance. There are men of ability, men who are industrious, men who are filled with ambition and who were on the high road to success when they married. But they got spenders and wasters for wives, and thereafter their lives became just a frantic struggle to keep even with the bill collector. Strive as they would, they could never get ahead. They had to let every opportunity pass them because they never had a cent to put into any enterprise. Every dollar had gone to pay for the wife’s clothes, and entertaining, and trying to keep up with people better off than they.

The man who never says “No” to his wife’s ceaseless demands on his pocketbook may think that he is being good to her, but in reality he could do her no worse turn. For you can no more satisfy a greedy woman than you can a greedy child. Such women are the daughters of the Scriptural horse leech, forever crying: “More, more, more!” And in the end, when the crash comes, the extravagant wife is crushed under the ruin she has brought upon her household.

A man is too good to his wife when he makes all of the sacrifices and she monopolizes all of the privileges. There are households in which the husband has no rights or consideration whatever. He goes shabby, while wife is arrayed like Solomon in all his glory. He walks, while wife rides around in a limousine. He stays at home, while wife goes forth to summer and winter resorts. His tastes, his comfort, his pleasure are never considered. He cultivates selfishness in his wife by never demanding a square deal from her and by never making her give as well as take. And his reward is his wife’s contempt, for no woman respects a man upon whom she can wipe her feet.

Oh, yes, a man can easily be too good to his wife. The really good husbands are not those who make spoiled babies of their wives, but those who encourage their wives to develop into self-controlled, helpful, useful women.

X

THE ABSENCE CURE FOR FAMILY ILLS

One of the most pathetic things on earth is the unnecessary unhappiness we endure. The big, heartbreaking tragedies no one may escape. The loss of those we love. Frustrated hopes. Disappointments. Despair. These are the inevitable portion of humanity, and there is dignity in meeting them with courage.

But to have your life poisoned by the sting of a gnat; to be done to death by pin pricks, to be robbed of your happiness by petty aggravations, that is a different matter, and one rages alike against the futility of it, and the ignominy of it. And, curiously enough, we neither endure with fortitude these little, petty ills that spoil the peace of our days, nor do we try to seek a remedy for them.

Take family troubles, for example, which are responsible for more real, heartbreaking, never-ending misery than anything else in the world. A man and a woman drawn together by some fleeting physical attraction get married. When that is over, they find that they have not one thing on earth in common. Their tastes differ on everything from politics to pie. Their every idea and opinion is antagonistic. They do not think the same thoughts, or speak the same language. They may be people of the highest integrity, models of all the virtues. They may try to do their duty nobly and with self-sacrifice. But their home is a dark and bloody battleground where they fight over every topic like dogs over a bone, and they make life a hell on earth for each other.

Sometimes parents and children cannot get along together. Sometimes a nice, domestic old hen hatches out a swan. Sometimes a swan finds that nature has bestowed an ugly duckling upon her, and great is the clacking, and the clucking, and the feather-picking around the barnyard.

Often brothers and sisters cannot agree. They clash on every subject under the sun. They express their opinions of each other with the brutal candor of near relationship, and leave each other sullen and sore with resentment. They never sit down to a meal without being verbally armed to the teeth, and the maimed survivors feel as if they had been through the battle of the Marne. Sometimes there is just one particular member of a family who is a perpetual storm center, and who has but to blow in at the door to shatter the peace and harmony of the household.

Being obliged to live with disagreeable and antagonistic people is the greatest affliction that can possibly befall us. Nothing compensates for it. Not tho we dwell in a palace, with every meal a banquet, and have everything that money can buy us. Better it is to dwell on a housetop, or in a lodging house, and eat at a quick lunch place, and have peace, than abide in splendor with those who irritate the very soul out of us.

Nor are we consoled by the fact that the very people who are so impossible to live with love us well enough to die for us.

We know well enough that it is mother’s affection for us, and her anxiety about us, that makes her nag us incessantly, and hand out advice to us until we are ready to scream. In their philosophical moments men and women realize that even their in-laws knock them for their own good.