CHAPTER LX

WHY SO MANY MARRIED WOMEN DETERIORATE

A woman writes me: "You would laugh if you knew the time I have had in getting the dollar which I enclose for your inspiring magazine. I would get a pound less of butter, a bar less of soap. I never have a cent of my own. Do you think it wrong of me to deceive my husband in this way? I either have to do this or give up trying at all."

There are thousands of women who work harder than their husbands and really have more right to the money, who are obliged to practise all sorts of deceit in order to get enough to buy clothing and other things essential to decent living.

The difficulty of extracting money from an unwilling husband has been the beginning of thousands of tragedies. The majority of husbands are inclined to exert a censorship over their wives' expenditures. I have heard women say that they would go without necessary articles of clothing and other requirements just as long as possible and worry for days and weeks before they could summon courage to ask for money, because they dreaded a scene and the consequent discord in the home. Many women make it a rule never to ask for money, except when the husband is leaving the house and in a hurry to get away. The disagreeable scene is thus cut as short as possible, as he has not time then to go into all the details of his wife's alleged extravagances and find out what has become of every cent of the money given her on some similar previous occasion.

The average man does not begin to realize how it humiliates his wife to feel that she must ask him for fifty cents, a dollar, or five dollars every time she needs it, and to tell him just exactly what she is going to do with it, and then perhaps be met with a sharp reproof for her extravagance of foolish expenditures.

Men who are extremely kind and considerate with their wives in most things are often contemptibly mean regarding money matters. Many a man who is generous with his tips and buys expensive cigars and orders costly lunches for himself and friends at the club because he wants to be considered a "good fellow," will go home at night and bicker with his wife over the smallest expenditure, destroying the whole peace of the household, when perhaps she does not spend as much upon herself as he does for cigars and drink.

Why is it that men are so afraid to trust their wives with money when they trust them implicitly with everything else, especially as women are usually much more economical than men would be in managing the home and providing for the children? A large part of the friction in the average home centers around money matters and could be avoided by a simple, definite understanding between husband and wife, and a business arrangement of household finances. A regular advance to the wife for the household and a certain sum for personal use which she need not account for, would do more to bring about peace and harmony in the majority of homes than almost anything else.

To be a slave to the home, as many women are, and then to be obliged to assume the attitude of a beggar for every little bit of money she needs for herself, or to have to give an accounting for every cent she spends and tell her lord and master what she did with her last money before she can get any more, is positively degrading.

When the husband gets ready to regard his wife as

an equal partner in the marriage firm instead of as an employee with one share in a million-dollar company, or as merely a housekeeper; when he is willing to regard his income as much his wife's as his own and not put her in the position of a beggar for every penny she gets; when he will grant her the same privileges he demands for himself; when he is willing to allow his wife to live her own life in her own way without trying to "boss" her, we shall have more true marriages, happier homes, a higher civilization.

Some one says that a man is never so happy as when he has a few dollars his wife knows nothing about. And there is a great deal of truth in it. Men who are perfectly honest with their wives about most things are often secretive about money matters. They hoodwink them regarding their incomes and especially about any ready cash they have on hand.

No matter how much the average man may think of his wife, or how considerate he may be in other matters, he rarely considers that she has the same right to his cash that he has, although he may be boasting to outsiders of her superior management in matters of economy. He feels that he is the natural guardian of the money, as he makes it; that he has a little more right to it than has his wife, and that he must protect it and dole it out to her.

What disagreeable experiences, unfortunate bickerings, misunderstandings and family prejudice could be avoided if newly-married women would insist upon having a certain proportion of the income set aside for the maintenance of the home and for their own personal needs, without the censorship of their husbands and without being obliged to give an itemized account of their expenditures!

It is a rare thing to find a man who does not waste ten times as much money on foolish things as does his wife, and yet he would make ten times the talk about

his wife's one-tenth foolishness as his own tentenths.

On the other hand, thousands of women, starving for affection, protest against their husband's efforts to substitute money for it—to satisfy their cravings, their heart-hunger, with the things that money can buy.

It is an insult to womanhood to try to satisfy her nature with material things, while the affections are famishing for genuine sympathy and love, for social life, for contact with the great, throbbing world outside. Women do admire beautiful things; but there is something they admire infinitely more. Luxuries do not come first in any real woman's desires. She prefers poverty with love to luxury with an indifferent or loveless husband.

How gladly would these women whose affections are blighted by cold indifference or the unfaithfulness of their husbands, exchange their liberal allowance, their luxuries, for genuine sympathy and affection!

One of the most pathetic spectacles in American life is that of the faded, outgrown wife, standing helpless in the shadow of her husband's prosperity and power, having sacrificed her youth, beauty, and ambition— nearly everything that the feminine mind holds dearto enable an indifferent, selfish, brutish husband to get a start in the world.

It does not matter that in her unselfish effort to help him she burned up much of her attractiveness over the cooking stove; that she lost more of it at the washtub, in scrubbing and cleaning, and rearing and caring for their children during the slavery of her early married life; it does not matter how much she suffered during those terrible years of poverty and privation. Just as soon as the selfish husband begins to get prosperous, finds that he is succeeding, feels his power, he often begins to be ashamed of the woman who has given up everything to make his success possible.

It is a sad thing to see any human being whose life is blighted by the lack of love; but it is doubly pathetic to see a woman who has given everything to the man she loved and who gets in return only her board and clothes and an allowance, great or small.

"Man

Some men seem to think that the precept, does not live by bread alone," was not meant to include woman. They can not understand why she should not be happy and contented if she has a comfortable home and plenty to eat and wear. They would be surprised to learn that many a wife would gladly give up luxuries and live on bread and water, if she could only have her husband's sympathy in her aspirations, his help and encouragement in the unfolding of her stifled talents.

I know a very able, promising young man who says that if he had had a rich father he never would have developed his creative power; that his ambition would have been strangled; that it was the desperate struggle to make a place for himself in the world that developed the real man in him.

This young man married a poor girl who had managed by the hardest kind of work and sacrifice to pay her way through college. She had just begun to develop her power, to feel her wings, when her husband caged her in his home, took away her highest incentive for self-development. He said that a man who could not support a wife without her working had no business to marry. He dressed his wife like a queen; gave her horses and carriages and servants. But all the time he was discouraging her from developing her self-reliance, taking away all motives for cultivating her resourcefulness and originality.

At first the wife was very eager to work. Her ambition rebelled against the gilded chains by which she was bound. She was restless, nervous, and longed to