LIX
THE SUPERIOR BUSINESS WOMAN
The other day a man killed his beautiful young wife because she was a better “business man” than he was and made more money. The woman loved her husband and was good to him. She was ambitious for him. She got him a job with the people for whom she worked and tried to push him along and help him in every way. But it simply was not in him to be the go-getter that she was. She was a success and he was a failure. And in the frenzy of morbid jealousy that this engendered in him, he slew her.
Thus vividly do we have brought to our attention one of the new difficulties that the advent of women into the business world has injected into the already complicated matrimonial proposition. It makes the question of how the modern wife can best be a helpmeet to her husband one that takes a Solomon in petticoats to answer. In olden times the matter was perfectly simple. The woman who wanted to help her husband along had only to be a good and thrifty manager, to pare the potatoes thin enough and squeeze the nickels. She did her part in building up the family fortunes by saving. But, in many cases to-day, the old woman’s granddaughter is a crackerjack business woman who sees that she can help her husband more by earning than by scrimping, and that she can make more money in one year in business than she could save in ten years by doing her own housework and wearing shabby clothes. So, as long as she is working for their common good, the woman cannot understand why her husband shouldn’t be just as willing for her to help him by working in an office as in a kitchen, or why the wife who does brain labor isn’t as good a wife as the one who does manual labor.
But the great majority of women who continue to follow any gainful pursuit after marriage find out that, while there is a new woman who looks at everything in life from a new angle, there is no new man. Women have changed in their relationship to man, but men stand pat just where Adam did when it comes to dealing with women.
If you will notice, it is only women who prate about equality between the sexes. Men take no stock in any such heresy. When a man tells a woman that she is an angel and that he looks up to her and worships her, it is one of the lover’s perjuries at which Jove laughs. In reality he doesn’t mean a word of it. The very basic thing on which a man’s love for a woman is built is his sense of superiority to her. He wants to feel stronger than she is, wiser than she is, to be more successful than she is. She must look up to him, revere him, ask his opinion, be guided by his advice.
That is why the clinging-vine type of woman is so appealing to men, and it is why intelligent, big-brained men so often marry morons and are happy and contented with them. Their silly little wives do not understand one word in five they say and are no companions to them, but they satisfy the masculine demand to dominate the woman. When the case is reversed, as it often is, and when the wife is the more intelligent, the stronger character—when the gray mare is the better horse and pulls most of the load—the marriage is invariably unhappy, and the husband almost invariably either openly or secretly hates his wife. His love for her is never strong enough to survive the hurt to his vanity. His sense of inferiority to her keeps his nerves raw, and if he is dependent upon her it turns his very soul to wormwood and gall. I have never known a woman who supported her husband who received any gratitude for it. He would eat her bread, but he did it as a snapping dog that bites the hand that feeds it.
There is nothing that fills a woman’s cup of happiness so full and overflowing as for her husband to achieve a notable success and be great and famous. She glories in being Mrs. Explorer or Mrs. Engineer or Mrs. Banker or Mrs. Author, and loves to shine in the reflected glory. But the deadliest insult you can offer any man is to speak of him as his wife’s husband and call him Mr. Mary Smith, although Mary may have written the book of the year or have performed some achievement that has made the world sit up and take notice of her.
Perhaps all of this is natural. Perhaps this cosmic urge that the male has to dominate the female is something instinctive for which he is not responsible.
But it makes the woman’s course a hard one to steer, for, curiously enough, the weak man is often attracted to the strong woman, and there is something maternal in the strong woman that wants to mother the weak man and makes her feel that he only needs her to take care of him and boost him and show him the way to success.
So the girl who is making a big salary marries the man who is making a small one, and she tries to supply for him the business sense he lacks and to galvanize him into a hustle of which he is incapable, and they live scrappily ever afterward. Yet there is nothing we can do about it as long as nature goes blundering along putting the brains and talents of merchants and bankers and trust presidents into a lot of women’s heads and making plenty of men who would have been wonderful housekeepers and done perfectly lovely embroidery work if only they hadn’t got the wrong sex.