Dorothy Dix—her book

I get hundreds upon hundreds of letters from disgruntled wives bemoaning their fates. They tell me that they are sick and weary of the monotony of domestic drudgery; that they have few amusements; that their husbands are indifferent to them and never pay them any compliments or show them any affection; that their husbands find fault with them for their every mistake, but never give them one word of praise for all the good work they do.

And these women have brooded over the hardships of their lot until they have grown morbid and they see the world as one great gob of gloom, with themselves as the blackest spot in it.

Without doubt, marriage is a cruel and a bitter disappointment to nine-tenths of those who enter into the holy estate. Especially is it disillusioning to women because they build such impossible hopes upon it, and go into it with such a blind faith that they are going to find it an earthly paradise.

It is incredible, but it is true, that despite her lifelong knowledge of the daily life her mother has led and her observation of the domestic strife in the households of her married friends and neighbors, every girl honestly believes that her own matrimonial venture will be a perpetual picnic, and that the man she marries will remain the perfect lover.

Of course, it doesn’t happen, and when the woman finds out that her own marriage brings her more kicks than ha’pence; when she realizes that she must share the common lot; when she has to bend her back to the hard and dreary labor of making a family comfortable, for which she gets neither the glad hand nor a pay envelope, and when she has to put up with a man who seems to have cornered the whole visible supply of pure cussedness, why, it gets upon her nerves, and she feels like flunking it.

So she beats upon her breast and cries out that this is not the marriage of which she dreamed. This sordid existence is not what she married for.

Of course, it isn’t. But it is marriage as it is. None of us realize our ideals. Our dreams never come true. And even when we get what we want, it is so warped and twisted that it is no longer the object of our desires, and we have paid for it more than it is worth. That is life.

To these unhappy wives I would offer this bit of homely counsel:

Sit down, sisters, and have a real heart-to-heart session with your own souls. Put out of your mind firmly and for all time the idiotic idea that there is any lot of perfect peace and happiness, any road you might have traveled that is not strewn with tacks. Worry and anxiety and sickness and sorrow and disappointment and loneliness are the portion alike of the highest and the lowest, and you cannot escape the human lot. It is life.

Then take a calm and dispassionate survey of your own situation. You will find your work tiresome and monotonous. So does every other person in the world find his or hers. The thing we do for our daily bread is bound to become a grind. Do you think for a moment that the banker doesn’t get sick and weary of grappling with credits and loans; that the author doesn’t have to flog himself to his desk; that the actor doesn’t weary of the lines he has said over thousands of times; that the film star is not nauseated with grease paint?

Every one thrills to his task at first as you did to your new pots and pans and bridal furniture. But the novelty wears off, and then comes the long, grim stretch of carrying on, because it is your job to which you have set your hand and which you mean to make a good job just because it is yours. That is life.

You complain that your husband takes your good work as a matter of course, but he howls loud and long over your mistakes. That is what happens to all workers. If you were a stenographer and spelled one word wrong; if you were a saleswoman and made one error in your calculations, your boss would pass over the thousands of words you had spelled correctly and the hundreds of good sales you had made, to call you down for your blunder.

If you were a writer or an actor, you would find that the critics would forget all the good work you had done to call attention to the weakness of your new book, or bemoan the performance you gave in a new part. As long as we walk straight no one notices it, but when we fall off the path we attract attention. It is life.

These unhappy wives ask, “What shall I do?” and one knows not how to answer the question. To tell them that, if they are patient and forbearing, and go on doing their duty as wives, they can change mean husbands into good ones is to tell them a wicked lie, and mislead them with false hopes. The leopard changes his spots just about as often as a man does his disposition, and I have yet to see the tightwad become generous; the surly, glum man turn into a ray of sunshine in his home; or the hard, cold, selfish man become the perfect lover to his wife.

Nor is divorce the solution of the unhappy wife’s problem. Marriage is not an episode of which you can say when you get a divorce, “This unpleasant chapter of my life is ended. I will shut the book, and forget all about it, and be perfectly happy henceforth.” Marriage sets its ineffaceable seal upon a woman, it colors her whole life; and divorce can no more give her back her lost joy, and faith, and trust, than it can restore her lost girlhood.

Besides, there are nearly always children to consider; children whose welfare a good mother places above her own; children for whom a home must be kept together; children who must be educated; who must be started in life, who need a father’s support and control. Divorce is not for the woman with children unless conditions are absolutely intolerable. And for the woman herself divorce is often a jumping out of the frying pan into the fire, for when she finds that she is rid of an unkind husband, she has to face a world that is unkinder still. Generally the woman has no private fortune. The courts award her but a meager alimony, and the collecting of that is generally about the hardest job on earth. She is trained to no business or occupation. Nobody wants her services, and she comes to know that the grumbling of an ill-tempered husband is no harder to endure than the howl of the wolf outside of her door.

Perhaps the best advice that one can offer these unhappy wives is to try to forget what they expected of marriage, and to just put it on a business basis, so much for so much, with a settled determination to make the best of a bad bargain. Their little flier in Heart’s Consolidated hasn’t paid the dividends they expected it to. Well, our speculations seldom do. Their matrimonial partners have proved hard to get along with. Well, many business men endure cranky men partners, who rasp their nerves, for the sake of the good of the firm.

And on the credit side of the ledger the unhappy wife can set this down, that she has, at least, her home, and her settled position in society, and they are great gain. It takes years and years of struggle and striving for the lone woman to reach the goal where she can have her own house, and gather about her the household gods that women worship, and that bless one by their presence.

I am not arguing that a woman would consider a house, no matter if it were a palace, a satisfactory substitute for a tender, loving husband, but I am trying to induce the woman who has an indifferent husband to realize that she is not half as badly off as she thinks she is, as long as she has her creature comforts.

Fortunately, the law of compensation always holds. The man who is a poor husband is often a good provider. Flirtatious husbands often atone for their sidesteppings with diamonds and furs. Stingy ones leave women rich widows. Even grouches leave their wives free to amuse themselves in their own way. After all, life is a series of compromises. If we don’t get the best, we are very foolish to throw away the second best and the wise woman who finds marriage a failure doesn’t go into physical and spiritual bankruptcy. She gets the best out of what she has. She makes the most of her bargain.

All of which just boils down into this: Dry your eyes on your best embroidered towels, O ye disgruntled sisters, and realize that you are not so unfortunate as you think you are, and what you are called upon to bear is just life.