Part 9

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.

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.

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.