Dorothy Dix—her book

A man wants to know if I don’t think his wife is very wrong and foolish to be hurt and offended because he is often irritable and cross at home. He says that she knows that he adores her, and that he is a model of all the standardized domestic virtues, but that he works all day under a terrific strain, and by the time night comes his nerves are worn to a frazzle. He thinks that his wife should appreciate this, and that instead of further rasping them with argumentation, she should apply a soothing emolument to them.

I agree with the gentleman that it is always the part of prudence for a wife to give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, instead of retorting with a snappy comeback when her husband makes a nasty crack at her. It certainly doesn’t add to the peace and harmony of a home for a wife to be ready to jump into her fighting clothes every time her husband makes a pass at her. Nothing comes of family rows but bitterness, and anger, and disillusion. Nor does any love long survive them.

I also agree with the gentleman that any woman who has cut her wisdom teeth on matrimony should be able to assay her husband’s temper and tell how much of it is due to raw nerves and how much to pure cussedness, and so know when to spread the salve and when to hand him a solar-plexus blow. Furthermore, I opine that a wife who starts anything with her husband at evening until after he is fed and rested, and has had his smoke and his paper unmolested, deserves to be put in the Home for the Incurably Feeble-Minded for the balance of her natural life or else bound over by the courts to keep the peace. For she is either lacking in brains or just loves a fight for the fight’s sake.

It is the greatest possible pity that women haven’t more sense of humor than they have, for if they did they would be able to laugh at many things their husbands do over which they shed scalding tears. It would enable them to see how really funny it is for a big man to get into a babyish tantrum over nothing and how much easier it is to kid him out of it than it is to make a scene over it. Unhappily, however, few women have a funny bone, and fewer still can see the joke when it is on them, and so husbands and wives meet temper with temper and irritability with irritability, and the domestic war goes merrily on.

The mistake that most wives make is in taking their husbands too seriously. They have heard so much about the mighty masculine intellect that they think their husbands are profound, thoughtful human beings who mean every word they say and whose every act is part of a deeply considered plan of life. Whereas the truth is that men babble just as meaninglessly as women do, and are the creatures of impulse. Also, women are under the misapprehension that they have a monopoly on nerves, and that hysterics are the sole prerogative of the feminine sex.

These beliefs make women attach a significance to the things that men say and do to which they are not entitled; and it makes them “get their husbands wrong” and break their hearts over crimes that the poor, blundering men do not even know that they are committing.

In consequence whereof the wife’s feelings are in a constant state of laceration, and she meets each hard knock with a still harder one, or else goes off and salts her wounds down in the brine of her tears.

Now, no one will argue that a human cyclone is a pleasant companion to live with, nor would any sane woman pick out a man who is giving a life-like imitation of the Day of Wrath with whom to spend her evenings. But, all the same, women make themselves unnecessarily miserable by taking their husbands’ humors too seriously.

The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul are not prompted by malice toward her. They are the reaction of nerves that have been frazzled to the breaking point by the worries of the day at the office. The frozen silence which the wife finds it so hard to endure is just sheer exhaustion of mind and body, and the woman who can just take her husband’s moods this way can not only save herself many a tearfest, but can make her husband eat out of her hand by feeding him and laughing at him and jollying him along.

Certainly, the woman who is married to a nervous, overworked man might well do a little mental balancing of accounts and check off a lot of temper, and impatience, and unreason, and fault finding against the finery he gives her, and the success he has achieved, of which she is so proud and which he has literally bought with his life’s blood. She might well forgive his faults and deal leniently with them, since they are the direct result of his struggle to lap her in luxury.

She is, believe me, a discerning and a tender wife who answers her husband’s irascible speeches with a pat on the head and a “there, there, it’s all right,” as she would a sick and fretful child, instead of going to the mat with him.

So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now for the husband’s.

Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and grouchiness, and general disagreeableness. No man has a right to come home at night and dump down on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper, and irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.

Because a woman has the misfortune to be a man’s wife is no reason he should insult her and say to her things that he would not say to any other woman who had an able-bodied brother, or that he would not dream of saying to any woman who had $10 to spend across his counter, or who was his client, or his patient.

If a man can control his temper and his tongue in dealing with the outside world, he can control it still at home. If he can be polite and courteous and flattering to other women, he can make the same gracious speeches to his wife, instead of growling like a bear when she asks him a simple question. And if he has any sense of honor, he will be the more careful of what he says to his wife than he is to the others, because his attitude means nothing to them, but his wife’s whole happiness is dependent on the way he treats her.

Nor does the fact that he overworks excuse a man’s irritability at home. Nine wives out of ten would rather have a little more amiability from their husbands and less money, if they had to choose between the two. The beloved husbands and wives are not those who work themselves into a state of nervous irritability for their families. They are those who keep themselves calm, and good natured, and pleasant to live with.

To expect other people to overlook our temper and forgive the cross and cruel speeches that we flash out at them without provocation is demanding too much of human nature.