Dorothy Dix—her book

Altho marriage has been the chief business of woman since Eve pulled off the first wedding in the Garden of Eden, women have not yet mastered the first indispensable principle of success in their profession. Millions of women have been married. Hundreds of thousands of women marry annually, and yet, as a class, women do not know how to treat a husband.

Here and there is a shining exception to this rule, and the result is an inspiring picture of domestic bliss. But the great majority of women still go stumbling along into misery and divorce because they have not had the wit to find out how to rub man’s fur the right way, and make him purr under their hands.

In a word, women fail to strike just the right note in their attitude towards their husbands. Sometimes they treat them better than they deserve. Sometimes worse, but seldom do they treat the men just as the men would like to be treated.

Perhaps the real reason that women fail in this most important particular is because they make the mistake of treating a husband as if he were a rational human being, and the same sort of an individual inside of the home circle that he is outside of it.

Never was there a greater error. The John Smith to whom a woman is married is no more the John Smith of the business world than he is some other man.

The John Smith, who is a lawyer, or a doctor, or a grocer in the outer world, is a big, strong, broad, self-reliant man who looks at everything in a large way, and is just, and tolerant, and even stoical in meeting the vicissitudes of life. The woman who marries him has perceived all of these qualities, and loved him for them, and she naturally expects him to exhibit these characteristics in home life.

Fatal blunder. John Smith, the business man, may be dealt with on a plain, sensible, aboveboard platform, but John Smith the husband, has to be jollied, and cajoled, and petted, and wheedled along the road he should go, if there is anything doing in the domestic felicity line in the household of which he is the alleged head.

Now the majority of husbands average up quite as well as the majority of wives, but even when a man is really good, and true, and strong, experience teaches his wife that there are three ways in which he likes her to treat him. They are:

(a) Like a baby.

(b) Like a demigod.

(c) Like a good fellow.

No matter how big and strong a man is, nor how many other men he bosses, he wants his wife to treat him as if he were a delicate infant who had to be petted, and nursed, and dandled, and chucked under the chin. There isn’t a man living whose secret ideal of a perfect wife isn’t a woman who puts the buttons in his shirt, and lays out his collar and tie in the morning, who has his slippers toasting on the radiator when he comes home of an evening, and who cooks just the particular thing he likes to eat, with her own hands.

Talk about your women who can hand out intellectual companionship! Produce your living pictures! Exhibit your paragons of virtue! They are simply not one, two, three with the wise dame who pets and fusses over her lord and master. And it isn’t because the man really wants his wife to wait on him. That doesn’t enter into it at all. He’s just like the three-year-old who howls for mama to put on his shoes or butter his bread when there are seven nurses standing around to do it.

Men are babyish in wanting their wives to show them off. The expression on the face of little Tommy while his fond mother is telling the smart things that he said, is exactly the same expression that is on Tommy’s father’s face while his wife is bragging about how he organized a trust, or won a big lawsuit, or was elected judge.

Wise,—oh, a daughter of Solomon is the woman who puts her husband through his paces for the benefit of company. Matrimony is one long, glad sweet song in the household of the lady who acts as a showman for hubby.

Consider also a man when he is sick, or thinks he is sick. How does he want to be treated then? Like a baby. He wants his wife to sit by his bed, and hold his hand, and weep tears of sympathy, and if she doesn’t believe he is going to die every time he has a headache, he considers her a cold, heartless icicle and doubts her affection.

Therefore, the very first principle in treating a husband is to treat him as if he was your littlest baby, and if you do, he will gurgle, and coo just as your two-year-old does when you smother him with kisses, and asks: “‘Oose de most booflest boy on earf, an’ mudders itty, pitty wonder, and world beater?”

Secondly, every husband likes to be treated as if he were a demigod.

Men won’t admit it, but in his soul every husband feels that he has conferred such an inestimable boon upon his wife by marrying her that she can never really repay him, anyway, but that it is up to her to keep busy on the job. Therefore, the least she can do is to act grateful.

The real reason why there is a continual conflict in most families over the money question is not because husbands are stingy, but because a man likes to dole the money out, piece by piece, so that the woman who gets it may have a living exhibition of his generosity.

When a man complains about how extravagant his wife is, and how much her hat and dress cost, it doesn’t mean that he begrudges her a single garment or the price thereof. On the contrary, it is his way of boasting to the world of how prosperous he is, and how well he provides for his family. Stupid, indeed, is the woman who does not comprehend this, and who does not keep her glad rags hanging in public, so to speak, and continually beat upon the cymbal, and chant pæans of praise about how good her husband is to provide her with her lovely clothes.

Nor is this as silly as it sounds. The average man gets practically nothing out of his labor, after he has supported his family, but his board and clothes, and it is pretty discouraging to spend your life toiling for those who take all that you can give, and make no sign of appreciation in return. So it is not strange that husbands like their wives to treat them as a beneficent providence from whom all blessings flow.

Husbands like to be treated as good fellows.

If the average married man could put up one prayer more fervent than all the rest it would be this: “Lord, send me a wife who laughs, and a home that isn’t an understudy to a funeral parlor!”

But his prayer isn’t often answered.

Now one of the great reasons why so many husbands and wives make shipwreck of their lives together is because a man is always seeking for happiness, while a woman is on a perpetual still hunt for trouble. When anything uncomfortable happens to a man he tries to forget it, to put it behind him, to get it out of his thoughts, even if he has to drown it in drink. When a misfortune befalls a woman she gloats over it. She keeps pressing her finger on every sore until she makes a raging abscess of it. Then she goes on a jag of tears.

The result of this feminine peculiarity is that the average home is not a cheerful place, nor is the average wife a joyous companion, and that is why a very large number of husbands seek their amusements elsewhere, and with other people. The greatest danger that menaces domesticity is that so many wives are killjoys.

The question is often asked—why do men, who are penurious and niggardly to their families, and who never pay a household bill without grumbling, spend money so lavishly on their vices? The answer is easy. A man’s home is dull, and the money that his family costs him gives him no fillip of pleasure. The other does. The home has been made to mean to him nothing but hard duty, ungilded by any joy. The opening of champagne for chorus girls is to the tune of gaiety and laughter. Therefore, he is willing to pay for one and begrudges paying for the other.

Once I was listening to a group of intelligent people discuss the most desirable quality in a wife. They named the usual standard virtues until suddenly one man burst out in a voice surcharged with genuine emotion.

“I tell you,” he said, “what a man wants in a wife more than anything else is a cheerful companion. Goodness? Bah! All women, at least the kind a man marries, are good. Economy? A man likes to spend money on his wife. Amiability? Who wants a simpering doll always about? Domesticity? Stuff and nonsense. A man’s stomach isn’t the most important part of him. Besides there is a good restaurant on every corner, if he is bound to gorge himself on food.

“I tell you what a man wants is cheerfulness in his wife. He wants to come home at night to somebody who will meet him with a smile, somebody who has got a lot of bright little things to tell him, and who can make him laugh, somebody who is willing to put on her prettiest dress and go out with him if he wants to go to any place of amusement.

“He doesn’t want to come home to a woman who is sodden with tears, or who is running over with the accumulated worries of the day that she dumps on him, who is full of her own and other people’s hard luck stories, and who looks like a chapter of the Lamentations of Jeremiah.”

Of course, whether a wife is melancholy or not does not, from an ethical standpoint, alter her husband’s duty to her. He should be strong enough to love and cherish her no matter how lacrimose she is; but the martyr’s crown is a piece of headgear that is distinctly unfashionable at the present time, and most men duck wearing it. Wherefore, it behooves the Amalgamated Order of Doleful Wives to cheer up, and try to be more lively companions to their husbands if they don’t want those gentlemen to stray off in search of ladies with sunnier dispositions.

As a matter of fact, men are, emotionally, very primitive creatures with a few simple domestic wants. They desire to be petted, and jollied, and looked up to by their wives, and then they want to be treated as good fellows. They want their wives to be chums with them, and not reforming institutions, or lecture bureaus.

The average man simply pines for cheerful comradeship from his wife. He wants her to enjoy the things that he does, to like the people he likes, to amuse herself with the things that divert him. He wants to hear her laugh, to see her eyes sparkle, and for her to treat him as on a par with herself, as if they were joyous fellow sinners together, instead of her being a living reproof to him as a poor low-browed creature, with musical-comedy tastes that make her shudder.

Yet do you ever notice the ordinary married couple out together? It is one of the most piteous sights on earth. The man is spending his money trying to give his wife a good time, and she meets his noble efforts with the rasping qualities of a crosscut saw. That is what gives eternal pungency to the old Weber and Fields joke about the man who, when asked if he was going to take his wife with him on a trip to Paris, replied: “No, I am going on a pleasure excursion.”

Of course whether it is any more a woman’s place to get along with her husband than it is his to get along with her is another fight, which I am not trying to referee here. So also is the question of how a wife likes to be treated. What I have tried to show is how a husband would like his wife to pull the wool over his eyes and put on the velvet glove before she tries to manage him—because men really enjoy being bamboozled by women who turn out a nice artistic job. What they object to is not being henpecked, but the raw way in which their wives do it.