Читать книгу Caper-Sauce: A Volume of Chit-Chat about Men, Women, and Things. - Fern Fanny - Страница 12

Some writer remarks, "We blunder fearfully with our domesticity in America. Our wives are only of two kinds: the family slave on one hand; the frivolous woman of fashion on the other!"

"Our wives!" As a woman can't have a "wife," I may logically infer that a man wrote the above paragraph, though without these two helping words I should have come to the same conclusion. Now so far as my limited knowledge goes, we generally find "in the market" that which is oftenest called for. Put that down in your memorandum book, sir. Men are but just beginning to find out that the two specimens of womankind referred to are much more difficult to get along with, in the main, than a woman of intelligence and mentality. I say they are just beginning to understand it. Men are very fond of the results that the "family slave" brings about, in the shape of good food and well-mended clothes, but they dodge with a fox's cunning the creaking and jarring of the machinery by which these results are obtained. They never want to be on hand when any process of disentanglement is necessary that defies temporarily the "family slave." Just then "business" is imperative – very likely in the shape of a journey – till the household machine runs smoothly again; nor does he care to hear how it is done, so that he is not bothered about it. If the "family slave" gets thinner and thinner, why, it is because "she takes everything so hard." She ought not to take things hard! That's her fault! It is an unfortunate nervousness which she ought to try to get rid of, because – it worries him! She is "no companion" for him – not a bit! When he wants to be amused, she is too tired to do it. In fact she don't see anything to be amused at. That is another unfortunate peculiarity of hers, this looking on the dark side of things. He don't do so. Not he! He deplores it; he sits down and writes just such a paragraph as I have just quoted above, like the consistent man he is.

I once heard a man who was in excellent circumstances, and whose young wife, just recovered from a severe illness, had taken her twelve-pound baby in her weak arms, and gone into the country for a few days, remark, as she left, "She would take all my old trousers with her to mend – God bless her!" adding, hallelujah-wise, "There's a wife for you!"

Now who made that "family slave"? Because she was magnanimous and self-forgetful, must he need be a brute? Women must take care of themselves in these matters. They must husband their strength for future demands, since their husbands won't husband it. That man was abundantly able to pay a tailor or a seamstress to repair his clothes. Instead of contenting himself with God-blessing this little meek wife, he should, like a true man, have positively forbidden her to work at all, in this short reprieve from household care. When there is nothing left of her but one front tooth, and a back, bent like the letter C, he will contemplate some round, rosy woman, who has not yet met her doom, and wonder how his wife came "to lose all her good looks so soon."

As to "fashionable women," were there no fashionable men, I don't imagine that they would exist on this planet. "She is so dowdy!" "She is so stylish!" Do you suppose the women who hear these masculine comments forget them? And do you suppose when, to use an equine expression, you have once given a wife "her head," by your admiration of "style" and fashion, that you can rein her up short, whenever you take a notion? Don't she hear you sneering at intelligent women, and don't she see you flattering fashionable fools?

Of course she does. Now let every man ask himself, before he sits down to write against the faults and follies of women, what he, individually, has done to form and perpetuate them? And if ever, in his whole life, when he saw a woman wronging her better self in any way, he extended a manly, brotherly hand to her, in the endeavor to lead her right? or, if he did not, on the contrary, join her, and walk with her, well pleased, in her own ill-selected path.