LXVI
A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME
It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course, a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it, fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.
But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess around as much as he likes.
I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered household pet.
Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a month or two.
But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have his family stay with them as she had to have hers.
As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome” on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother, drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might like staying in it better.