Part 34

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.

Now, the rules for keeping the peace are the same everywhere, and both men and women are familiar with them. Every man knows that there isn’t a woman living that he can’t make eat out of his hand by showing her a few attentions, a little tenderness and consideration and paying her a few compliments. Every woman knows that there isn’t a man that she can’t jolly along the way she wants him to go and who does not respond to judiciously applied salve. So when husbands and wives, who know perfectly well how to work each other without friction, deliberately and with malice aforethought rub each other the wrong way, it is obviously because they enjoy their daily dozen fracases and find fun in seeing the fur fly. If that were the end of it, we might well shrug our shoulders and, while wondering at their taste, leave them to take their pleasure as they saw fit in the cruel pastime of baiting each other. But, unfortunately, the family spat is not the innocent diversion that husbands and wives appear to think it is, nor does it end when the husband puts on his hat and bangs the door behind him and goes downtown, and the wife wipes away a tear or two and goes about her daily tasks.

The children are the real victims in these family fights. It is they who stumble from the domestic battleground with shattered nerves, with torn and bleeding spirits and souls, with maimed and deformed characters. All of us have known children who have taken to the streets almost as soon as they could walk to escape homes that were full of bickering and discord. We have seen how little control the fathers and mothers who could not control their own tempers had over their children, and we have not wondered when truant officers tell us that nine-tenths of the wayward girls and hoodlum boys are the children of divorced parents, or else, of parents who did not get along together. Now comes a great psychiatrist who asserts that he has never known an instance of nervous breakdown in the children of happily married parents who were brought up in a peaceful home.

Read that over again. Memorize it, you fathers and mothers who begin the day by having a row at the breakfast table because the coffee isn’t just as you like it or the toast is burnt or you neglected to send up the coal yesterday and forgot to leave the money for the milkman. You think it is of no consequence because your wife knows you don’t mean half of what you say and she is fighting back more from force of habit than anything else. But neither one of you gives a thought to the children who are listening to it all, to the children who are learning to regard you with contempt, who are having all their illusions shattered; whom you are teaching to be bitter and misanthropic, with no faith in anything beautiful or fine. You do not realize that you may not only be giving them a warp in character that will bar them from success in life, but that you may be actually dooming them to a breakdown that will make them wrecks in body and mind.

Isn’t that a pretty high price to pay for the pleasure of quarreling? And isn’t it a cruelly unfair thing to force your children to settle your score? For the sake of the children you brought into the world and for whom you are responsible, isn’t it worth while to deny yourself the pleasure of finding fault with your husband or wife and saying all the mean, acrimonious things you can think of? No use in saying that you can’t get along together. You can, if you want to. You get along with other persons.

LXIII

THE LEARNED PROFESSION OF HOME-MAKING

No complaint is more general—possibly no belief is more prevalent among women—than that a woman of intelligence wastes her energies and her abilities in being merely a housekeeper. Following the domestic arts is a despised calling, held in such contempt by the majority of women that they never take the trouble to achieve success in it; and yet there is no other occupation under the sun that requires so many and such varied talents as does the learned profession of home-making. Did you ever think what a woman must be in order to create and carry on a happy and prosperous home?

She must be a financier. There can be no peace and pleasure in a home where the wolf is always howling under the window and the bill collector hammering on the door. There are, of course, a few men in every community who are such gifted money-makers that they can annex more coin than any woman can spend, but for the great mass of ordinary, industrious, hard-working humanity the wife settles the financial status of the family. It is her ability to handle money, her knowledge of where to spend and where to economize, her knack of making a dollar buy a hundred and five cents’ worth and get a blue trading stamp thrown in to boot, that is at the foundation of every prosperous home. We don’t hear anything about it, because the woman doesn’t know herself how awfully clever she is, but the majority of women in this country are doing marvels of financiering in the way they make both ends meet in their housekeeping allowance, and keep up appearances, that entitle them to qualify in the Rockefeller class.

She must be a general.

She must know how to command. She must know how to set all the multitudinous wheels of household machinery in motion and be able to keep them moving without friction. She must be able to enforce obedience, inspire enthusiasm, plan campaigns, forestall her enemy, be fertile in expedient and subtle in strategy. Any woman who maintains a comfortable and well-ordered home, the kind of a house that we like to visit, and who raises a nice family and marries her daughters off well could give the commander-in-chief of the army points on generalship.