Chapter III: Part 3

Being able to make your own living sets you free. Economic independence is the only independence in the world. As long as you must look to another for your food and clothes you are a slave to that person. You must obey him. You must defer to him. You must bend your will to his.

But when you can stand on your own feet you can snap your fingers in the face of the world and tell it where it gets off. You do not have to endure tyrannical parents. You do not have to put up with a cruel husband. You can support yourself, and you are free.

So I urge you, girls, never to rest until you have fitted yourselves to earn your own bread, and butter, and cake. And remember, the better your work the more you earn. It is efficiency that pulls down the big pay envelope.

It doesn’t make a bit of difference what you do, my dear. It is the way you do it that counts. You can make a success or a failure of any occupation under the sun. The fat pay envelope is the reward of superexcellent work. It isn’t the perquisite of any particular trade or profession.

We do best those things that we enjoy doing, and so I urge you to sit down quietly and study yourself and try to find out what nature intended you to be.

Probably you have no very decided talent, no cosmic urge that makes you feel that you must paint, or sing, or dance, or cook, or keep books, or else life will be dust and ashes in your mouth.

But you are sure to find that there is something that you like to do better than other things. It may be trimming hats. It may be messing around the kitchen. It may be that you are quick at figures and can always remember dates. It may be that you write a good hand, or always got a hundred in spelling at school.

There is always some one thing for which you have a turn, as the phrase goes, and that points the road for you to follow.

If you have no mechanical skill, don’t do anything that requires deftness of the hands. If you can’t spell, don’t waste any time trying to be a stenographer. If you cannot add up a column of figures three times without getting four different results, pass up bookkeeping. You will never make a success of anything for which you have no aptitude. You will always hate it and be bored by it.

The successful people are those who love their work so well that it is a sheer joy to do it; who never count the labor that they put into it, and who are so interested in it that it is perpetually in their thoughts.

Therefore choose the thing that you like to do and get fun out of doing, and don’t just blunder into taking the first job that presents itself or make the mistake of taking up some profession to which you are not called because some other girls are doing so or because it seems to you romantic or elegant.

Of course, in these days of the emancipation of women, every road is as free for a girl to follow as it is to a boy, but you will find that those women make the greatest successes who stick to purely feminine lines. There is just as much need for woman’s work in the world as there is for man’s, and when it is equally well done it is equally well paid. In some occupations it is a little better paid because there are fewer women experts than there are men.

There are very few women who have risen from the ranks to become presidents of banks, or trust magnates, or big manufacturers; but every community has in it women who have made tidy fortunes as dressmakers, or milliners, or boarding-house keepers.

Teaching, nursing, cooking, sewing; home-making in all its ramifications and branches; buying and selling pretty things; the building and furnishing of houses; the healing of the sick, all of these are strictly within the feminine province, and you will not make a mistake if you choose whichever one of these occupations appeals to your fancy. Women have been unconsciously trained along these lines for centuries and have for them an inherited aptitude. It takes the average man years of profound study to acquire the sense of color that a girl baby is born with. And any dub of a woman can give an architect points on lights, and kitchen sinks, and the heights of shelves and about closets. So stick to your last and capitalize your feminine intuitions instead of trying to invade masculine fields. Even women writers and women artists are more successful when their work is most womanly. And great actresses will be remembered for the feminine rôles they portrayed, not for the masculine parts they essayed and in which they were grotesque failures.

Having selected your occupation, perfect yourself in it. Master its technique. Don’t be satisfied to be an also-ran. Make of yourself a blue-ribbon winner. You will have to work longer hours and harder doing ill-paid work than you will doing highly paid work. The difference between a $15 cook and a $10,000 chef is just a matter of skill. One woman gets $5 for a hat, another $50. It is just the touch to a bow or ribbon or a twist to a bit of velvet that does it. Whether you get a thin pay envelope or a thick one as a stenographer, or bookkeeper, or clerk, depends upon how expert you are. So make up your mind that you are not going to work for a pittance, and go after the big salary by making yourself worth it. Employers are just pining to pay the price of good work.

Then tackle your job as if you meant to make a life-work of it. Don’t look upon it as a bridge of sighs that you have to travel over with reluctant feet from the schoolroom to the altar. Think of it as something you are going to do as long as you live; something that is going to be your friend, and comforter, and stay, and to which you will give the best that is in you. That won’t keep you from marrying if the right man comes along, and it will be a powerful stay if no man comes. Not many girls do this. They regard their work as only a makeshift until they can marry, and so they never take the trouble to learn how to do it properly. That is why they fail, and why they are ill-paid. Don’t be one of them. Choose a congenial occupation and put your heart and your back into it, and your success will be assured.

XIII

TRIAL DIVORCE

I believe the one thing that would do more than anything else to stop the utter wrecking of homes and the half-orphaning of children, in the case of unhappy marriages, would be the institution of trial divorce and the refusal of the courts to make any divorce decree absolute under two years. For so many husbands and wives think they have ceased to love each other, when they are only too much fed up with each other’s society. So many persons think they long for freedom, when they only need a rest. So many persons think divorce a panacea for every ill, who find out, when they try it, that the remedy is worse than the disease.

The great majority of men and women are romantically in love when they get married, and they expect to live ever afterward in a state of storybook bliss. Then comes the inevitable disillusionment, when they find out that they have married ordinary human beings instead of angels and motion-picture heroes. Comes the clash of personalities. The fight of the selfish to get the best for one’s self. The rebellion at the sacrifices that matrimony demands.

The woman begins to nag. The man gets grouchy and surly. Each magnifies every fault of the other. Resentment and disappointment blot out every memory of love and tenderness, of goodness and nobility. They come to the point where they feel that they cannot stand each other a minute longer and rush off to the divorce courts.

But the ink is hardly dry on their decrees before they begin to view each other in a kindlier light. The man, living in his club or at a boarding house, wandering from restaurant to restaurant, hating the cooking and getting his digestion upset, begins to think of his ex-wife’s good points. How true and loyal and devoted she was! What a good cook and housekeeper! And he wonders that he didn’t have enough sense of humor to laugh at her nagging instead of letting it get on his nerves.

The woman, trying to make a home for herself with less money than she is accustomed to, bewildered and terrified at having to face life for herself, with no man to depend on, begins to recall her husband’s virtues instead of his faults, and to reflect that it is better to have even a husband who is short on compliments, and shy on attentions, and long on knocks, than to have no husband at all.

And in their secret souls both are conscience-stricken when they look at their children and see them lacking a mother’s or a father’s care and a real home. So there are thousands of couples who are merely disgruntled with each other who would come together again if a trial divorce gave them time in which the galled spots that the matrimonial yoke has made on their necks could heal and they could find out that they hadn’t got such bad teammates, after all.

The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close range.

Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to him.

Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they would find that they preferred the old love to the new.

For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had and are about to lose.

Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib love-maker.

The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or not.

The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.

So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.

XIV

MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE

A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive; in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.

This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.

Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog. Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just being loved.

It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake, and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.

All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.

The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy, too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.

There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.

A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him. He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.

A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.

She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a still hunt to find her real soul-mate.

To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.

The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”

The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no trouble to please them.

But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.

A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who married men they didn’t love.

The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night because you know you can’t lose him.

Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for a woman to love than to be loved.

XV

ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?

Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.

They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.

Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being lonesome, and pity them accordingly.

It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom they would never tire.

It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves, on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their conversational repertoire.

But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse. Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else except take the curse off loneliness.

You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances, recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.

We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor company for themselves.

You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things, if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe, that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead of a demon of remorse.

It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving, tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society exhilarating.

When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!

XVI

KEEPING YOUNG

None of us wants to die. No matter how strong our religious faith, nor how lustily we sing “Heaven is my home,” none of us is in a hurry to go there. We prefer to stay in a world in which we are acquainted and acclimated. Likewise, we all dread old age. It fills us with horror to think of becoming bent and tottering old men and women, our vigor of mind and body gone, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So from time immemorial humanity has been on the still hunt for some magic that will stay the devastating hand of time and enable it to hold on to the youth it prizes so dearly. The ancients sailed the world over seeking fabled islands and miraculous fountains of perpetual youth. We moderns pin our faith to the surgeon’s knife and the druggist’s bottles, to monkey glands, and face liftings, and paints, and powders, and hair dyes.

All in vain. The black oxen of the years march over us, treading out our youth and beauty, our strength and high spirits, and nothing that we can do will stop them. So it seems a pity that we should waste so much thought, so much struggle, and effort, and energy, and money in essaying an impossible task. For do what we may, we cannot keep young, and when we try to camouflage age as juvenility the only people in the world that we fool are ourselves.

We can dye our hair the gold, or the black, or the jet of girlhood, but we cannot put under it the fresh face of sixteen. We can have our skin gored and tucked until all of our wrinkles are taken out, but there still remain the tired, old eyes that have seen fifty or sixty years. We can starve ourselves until we get the figures of flappers, but we are not lithe and graceful. We are living skeletons. We can roll our stockings and borrow our granddaughter’s clothes, but it doesn’t make us look like debutantes. It makes us look like those afflicted with senile dementia. The truth is, the more we fight age the harder it fights back and the sooner it conquers us. None grow old so quickly as those who work themselves into premature age trying to keep young.

Once I was standing behind a jaunty little figure perched on the runningboard of a car. She wore the gayest and sportiest of sport suits. She had the thin figure of a girl of fifteen. Her bobbed henna-colored hair curled under the brim of a rakish little hat. Presently she turned around and disclosed a face that was like a mask, it was so plastered over with cosmetics. “Heavens! Did you ever see such an old hag?” exclaimed a man near me.

Now, this woman was not more than fifty years old. She was in the prime of life, at an age when many women are handsomer than they ever were in their lives. No one would have thought of her as being old at all, if she had been willing to appear her own honest age; if she had had the pleasing plumpness that belonged to her time of life; if her soft, gray hair had waved about her face, and if she had been appropriately dressed. It was her effort to appear kiddish that called attention to what an old goat she was.

If bobbing and dyeing their hair, and dieting themselves to emaciation, and wearing knee-length skirts made elderly women look young and girlish, they would not only be justified in doing so, it would be a virtue to do it, for thereby they would make themselves easy on the eyes. But just the reverse is true. Their affectation of youth only calls attention to what a long distance they have traveled from youth. Old mutton never seems so old, and tough, and stringy as when it is dressed as spring lamb.

And the folly of trying to act young after you are old is just as great as that of trying to look sixteen when you are sixty. Women have been told so often they must keep their spirits young, they must never think old thoughts, they must never speak of age, or admit to themselves they are getting older, that they have come to believe that, simply by forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain perpetual girlhood.

We all know women who begin every reminiscence by saying that they were very young at the time it happened, and who give us to understand their husbands were cradle snatchers, who married them when they were mere infants. We know old women who are always teasing themselves about men, and talking about their best beaus, and pretending to have flirtations with boys young enough to be their grandsons, and repeating compliments about their eyes or their fascinations they allege men paid them, but that even an idiot would know that they made up themselves. How ridiculous the poor souls make themselves! How infinitely older they appear than the women who do not try to pose as vamps after they have ceased to look the part, and who regard men just as they do women, as interesting and agreeable human beings.

Perhaps, after all, we make too big a bugaboo of growing old. The twilight has its charms no less than the dawn or high noon, and so the last lap of the journey of life has its compensations and its joys if we are willing to accept them.

Anyway, the only way we can escape old age is by dying young. But if we welcome it as a friend, it deals kindlier with us than if we fight it as an enemy.

XVII

GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN

A young woman writes me that she considers that she has a right to live her own life in her own way and do exactly as she pleases. So she has broken most of the Ten Commandments and snapped her fingers in the face of Mrs. Grundy. And now that she finds that her reputation is being torn to tatters, she thinks that she is being most unfairly treated.

“Oh, how I hate the whole tribe of kitty-cats!” she wails. “Oh, how hard, and cruel, and unjust people are!” Then she asks, “Don’t you think that gossip is the unpardonable sin?”

Not at all. Gossip is one of the most powerful influences in the world for good. It is the invisible, omnipresent policeman that enforces law and order. It is the scourge that keeps the trembling wretch in order and makes the weak-kneed and the wobbly walk the straight and narrow path.

We can stifle the voice of conscience, but we can’t silence the voice of our neighbors. We can dope ourselves into believing that we have a right to make our own code of conduct, but we can’t force the community in which we live to take our point of view on the matter, or to make any exceptions in our behalf to the standards that society has set up for good behavior. And it is this fear of what “they’ll say” that makes us curb our appetites and passions and keep up at least an outward show of decency. For no matter how vain and egotistic we are; no matter how self-complacent and self-satisfied we are; no matter how independent we think we are, we are all cowards who grovel in the dust before public opinion. It is the lifted eyebrow. It is the cold, measured, appraising look that weighs us in the balance and finds us wanting. It is the turn of a shoulder away from us and the little hush that falls on a group as we approach that tells us that we have been the subject of unfavorable discussion, which we dread more than we do the wrath of God.

It is the knowledge that she will be gossiped about if she indulges in any flirtations which keeps many a bored young married woman with romantic yearnings from indulging in little affairs with good-looking bachelors. She knows there might really be no harm in her having lunch with Mr. A. or going to the theater with Captain C., but that she could never explain it to the woman who lives across the street.

And the next time the Current Events Club meets she knows that she will be the current event of burning interest discussed. Therefore she turns down the alluring invitations and stays at home, and minds her p’s and her q’s and her babies.

And it is the fear of gossip that makes many an indiscreet girl watch her step and saves her from the stumble that would land her in the pit. She is easy-going and good-natured, and warm-hearted and affectionate, and she sees no harm in letting boys that she likes kiss her and fondle her, but it makes the flesh creep on her bones to think of the Amalgamated Scandal Mongers’ Union getting out their hammers and going for her if she does. She knows well enough that the neighbors on either side keep tab on what hour her beaux go home and what goes on as they sit on the front porch or stoop of an evening, and she conducts herself accordingly. There is no chaperon so efficient as Mrs. Grundy.

If we could only do as we pleased and get away with it without any censorious comments from our fellow creatures, there would be many more philandering husbands and wives than there are, many more girls wandering down the primrose path, many more neglected children and ill-kept houses, many more wife-beating husbands and virago wives. It is the knowledge that, if they give way to their natural impulses, they will be talked about, which gives many would-be sinners the strength to resist the temptation to be as bad as they would like to be.

The people who think it is so wicked to be talked about are only those who have something to hide, something that reflects on their character. It is our bad deeds we don’t want discussed. We are tickled to death to have our good ones broadcasted to the ends of the earth.

No man objects to having it told about that he is a model husband, a good provider and a tender father. The thing he wants hushed up is that he half starves his family in order to spend the money on a flapper. No woman wants to put the soft pedal on the conversation when her friends are telling what a wonderful wife and mother she is; but she doesn’t know how women, who call themselves her friends, can be catty enough to whisper behind their hands that she went out joy-riding with young Snookums and didn’t get home until 4 in the morning, while the baby was nearly dying with the croup.

Those who are down on gossip and feel that the world should cover up their shortcomings with a blanket of silence are unreasonable. Why should other people be more careful of your reputation than you are yourself? If you do not care enough for your good name to protect it, why demand that service of the general public? Foolish and vain expectation! For the gossipers keep on their good work, and the only way you can escape being talked about is to be so exemplary that you are a dull subject for conversation.

XVIII

THE LUCKY WORKING WOMAN

Why do we hold to the theory that work is a blessing to men, but a curse to women? We know beyond all questioning that the necessity of earning his bread by the sweat of his brow was the consolation prize that Adam was handed along with his eviction papers when he was turned out of Eden. We know that the only happy man is the busy man. We know that only in constructive labor does a man find an interest that never palls and a game in which there is a perpetual thrill. We know that work is the greatest anodyne for sorrow and the best protection against temptation. We know that, as Stevenson says, “if a man loves the labor of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him, and he is of all men most enviable.”

So manifold are the benefits men derive from work, so salutary are its effects upon them, that we have a contempt for the idle, purposeless man and feel that, no matter how much money he has, he has no right to spend his life in loafing. We are eager to get our boys to work, so that their restless young energy may find a legitimate outlet, instead of being employed in devising new forms of dissipation. The young man must have something to do, and if he isn’t bending his back in honest farming he will be breaking his neck in sowing a wild-oats crop.

Our attitude, however, toward women and work is diametrically opposite. We do not regard work as a good thing for women. On the contrary, we consider it a misfortune for a woman to have to work. We have even coined a phrase for it and speak of the woman who must earn her own living as a “poor working woman.” Worse still, the woman who works pities herself. The mother whose daughters go down to business every morning bewails their fate and feels that destiny has dealt most unkindly by them. The woman who must do her own housework, and look after her own babies, and make her own clothes sheds barrels of tears over her lot.

Men also accept this view of the situation that labor is a curse to women, and work themselves to death in order that their wives and daughters may live in parasitic ease, with servants to wait upon them and have nothing to do but kill time. In fact, the consensus of opinion seems to be that the ideal state for a woman is that in which she never performs any useful labor, but merely sits on a silk cushion and feeds upon strawberries, sugar and cream. All of this is a distorted view of the situation. Women need to work just as much as men do. Idleness has just as disastrous an effect upon the feminine character as it has upon the male, and among women, as among men, the only happy, contented ones are those who are so much engrossed in some useful labor that they haven’t leisure in which to consider whether they are satisfied or not.

Mother “poor Marys” and “poor Sallys” her daughters who have to earn their living, but nowhere else will you see healthier, happier girls than those holding down good jobs in stores and offices. Nine times out of ten the girl behind the counter is brighter, more alert, and finds life a far more entertaining proposition than does her purposeless idle sister before the counter.

Nor is the domestic woman who has to do her own housework entitled to shed any tears of self-pity on our necks. There is no more reason why a husky young woman shouldn’t do her share of the work of the domestic partnership than there is why her husband should not do his. It is no more of a hardship for her to have to work than it is for him, and many a rich old woman who sits now with empty hands that ache for occupation will tell you that her happiest days were the busy, crowded ones when she got up at five o’clock to cook her husband’s breakfast before he went to the factory and sat up until eleven o’clock washing and patching his clothes so that he could make a decent appearance next day.

It is a significant fact that the women who fill sanitariums and enrich nerve specialists are not the overworked, hard-driven wives and mothers. They are the middle-aged and elderly women, who have nothing to do but to canvass their systems for symptoms of every disease they read about in the magazines. It takes leisure to develop invalidism. Busy people keep well because they haven’t time to be sick.

Nearly every man’s ambition is to keep his wife in idleness, and he thinks that he is being a good husband when he can boast that she hasn’t a thing on earth to do but to amuse herself. It is pathetic that the thing that so many good husbands strive for is their undoing. For it is the idle women who are the peevish, fretful, discontented wives. It is the idle women who run off with all sorts of fool fads and fancies. It is the idle women who decide that their good, honest, hard-working husbands are not their real soul-mates, and who get into scandals with jazzhounds and elope with romantic-looking sheiks they have picked up in hotel lobbies.

The idle woman is never a happy woman. Having nothing to do but to think about herself, she is sure to prod around in her mind until she finds a grievance. Having nothing to do, she is sure to get into mischief. Having no interesting occupation, she begins to hunt for thrills. And the net result is that she works harder trying to amuse herself than she would at scrubbing floors, and the only reward is that life is flat, stale and unpalatable in her mouth.

Let us hope that the time will soon come when we will have enough intelligence to perceive that work is a woman’s salvation even as it is a man’s, and when we will congratulate the woman with a job instead of pitying her.

XIX

AN INDOOR SPORT

This is a sad world, mates, with too little sunshine in it, so far be it from me to abridge, abate or curtail any innocent pleasure. But it does seem to me that there are certain diversions that should be indulged in only in the privacy of home. One of these is the family spat. Apparently a large number of men and women get married for the sole purpose of providing themselves with a sparring partner, with whom they can put on the gloves at a moment’s notice with, or without, the slightest provocation. Life has no dull moments for them, because they are always saying something that draws blood, or framing a retort that will cut to the quick, and the excitement of a battle to the death is perpetually thrilling their nerves.

Without doubt, it is a merry and adventurous existence for the doughty domestic warriors who enjoy that kind of thing! I would not be cruel enough to deny them the cheery pastime of going to the mat over every trivial difference of opinion. But I do contend that conjugal quarrels are an indoor sport that should be pursued only when the participants have sought the seclusion that the cabin grants, as they used to say in “Pinafore,” and when all the shades have been pulled down and the keyholes stuffed with cotton.

Possibly the lack of an audience might take off a little of the edge of the bout for the battling husband and spouse; but, oh, how immeasurably it would add to the comfort and happiness of those of us who are the innocent bystanders and who are forced to look on, sick with horror, at these encounters! In all good truth I know of no other situation so miserable and so embarrassing as to be called upon to referee a fight between a married couple. Their quarrel is, to begin with, a matter with which we have no concern; one in which we do not desire to meddle; one in which we ardently wish to take neither side. It makes us feel as if we were cowards to keep silent while a man hurls deadly insults at his wife, and we writhe in vicarious shame while a woman vituperates her husband.

We have the sense of having assisted in an indecent orgy when a husband and wife strip every rag of reserve away from their relationship and fling open the doors of their skeleton closets, and rattle their bones in public. Nor are we consoled by the knowledge that the people who make public exhibitions of their tempers must enjoy doing so or else they would not do it. Yet we all number among our friends, husbands and wives, otherwise estimable and charming individuals, who always stage their fights in the most conspicuous place they can find, and who seem to prefer an audience to privacy. When you meet them for an evening’s diversion they are having a preliminary set-to. Perhaps the husband has come home late from the office, or has forgotten to mail a letter, or possibly the wife has kept her husband waiting while she did her hair over the second time. During the selection of the dinner they get warmed up to the work and put in some punches with real steam behind them. They clinch, and bite, and gouge over the selection of a play, and they reach for each other’s vital spots and get in dirty jabs at the supper dance that follows the play.

Doubtless the fighters are enjoying themselves, but a pleasant time is not being had by all. The abashed onlookers know not what to do. They do not know whether to rush in and make it a free-for-all fight or to try to mediate between the warring couple, or whether to pretend to have been suddenly stricken deaf, dumb and blind. And they wind up by feeling outraged that they should have been placed in such a mortifying position, and wishing heartily that husbands and wives would keep their quarrels for home consumption, and not inflict them on their friends.

The same strictures apply to the woman who henpecks her husband. That also is one of the quiet home joys that should be strictly confined to the domestic circle. I raise no voice of protest against the woman who has wit and strength and determination enough to oust her husband out of his position as head of the house and assume it herself. It is a matter between the husband and wife, and if he hasn’t enough spunk to fight for his rights he deserves to lose them. But why cannot the bossy women be content with exercising their tyranny quietly and unobtrusively? Why do they insist upon rattling the chains by which they lead their husbands until they call public attention to them?

Think of the women you know who always say “MY house.” “MY car.” “MY children.” Who always walk ahead of their husbands and point out a seat, and say, “John, sit there,” and who always tell John where to get on and where to get off! And think how all the rest of us are embarrassed for poor John! Believe me, dirty linen should be washed at home, and family quarrels staged there. That is one of the main things for which homes are designed.

XX

SHOULD WOMEN TELL?

I get a great many letters from women who write that there is a dark stain on their past life. In the headstrong folly of youth they took a step down the primrose path, then repented of their sin, and turned their back upon it, and laid hold upon righteousness.

Sometimes nobody knows of the slip but the girl herself and the man who was her partner in wrong-doing. Sometimes a woman who had mired her skirts to the knees has washed them clean with her tears of remorse, and had the courage to build anew her life in some place where her early escapades are unknown.

Then love comes to these women. Good men offer them marriage and an honorable place in society. And the question they ask is, shall they tell these men the story of their life before they marry them, or bury the secret in their heart, and leave the matter on the knees of the gods?

This is a problem no human wisdom can solve, for, so far as the woman is concerned, it is a case in which she will be damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t. Her chances of getting happiness—or misery—through opening up her skeleton closet and exhibiting its contents to the man who has asked her to be his wife are about even, with the odds for happiness slightly in favor of keeping the lid clamped down good and hard on her secret.

The question of right does not enter into the matter unless you institute a prematrimonial confessional in which men shall bare their souls as well as women. There is no more real reason why a woman should tell a man every detail of her past than there is why he should tell her of every time that he has strayed off of the straight and narrow path.