On Choosing a Husband : Part 5

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 20 of 27)

But in this bargain men have the best of it because the most characteristic thing in woman is tenderness, and the most characteristic thing in man is cleverness; and which do you think is the better to live with? What is the virtue in cleverness coupled with, for instance, a malicious tongue? What is the virtue in clever things if he says them at your expense? The vital thing for you is, what are the uses to which he puts his knowledge and capacities? That he knows the ways of the world may impress you, but does he know them to admire them? And if so, where does he stand compared with another, who is less versed and versatile, but who, as your heart tells you, would hate the ways of the world if he did know them?" ...

Indeed, I seem to see that one cannot adequately write a book on Womanhood without including in it somewhere a statement of what manhood is and ought to be. Surely one of our duties to girlhood is to teach it the elemental truths of manhood. Such teaching must recognize the facts which modern psychology perceives more clearly every day, and it must combine that knowledge with the eternal truths of morality, which are so intensely real and practical in the great issues of life, such as this. The great fact which modern psychology has discovered is that intellect is less important, and emotion more important than we used to suppose; that knowledge, as we lately observed, is non-moral, and may be for good or for evil; that cleverness is merely cleverness, and may serve God or mammon; that it is the nature of the man or the woman which determines the influence and the uses of education.

A girl should know something of what I have elsewhere called the transmutation of gender as it shows itself in the higher as distinguished from the lower types of manhood: she should know that it is good for a youth to spend his energy in visible ways and in the light of day; there is the less likelihood that it is being spent otherwise. She should prefer the man who is visibly active and who keeps his mind and body moving; she should know, as the school boy should know, that the capacity to smoke and drink really proves nothing as regards manhood. Doubtless there is some courage required in learning to smoke, and so much, but it is not much, is to the smoker's credit; but for the rest, smoking and drinking are simply forms of self-indulgence, and though they are doubtless very excusable and are often practiced by splendid men, they are of no virtue in themselves. Further, they are open to the fundamental objection that they lessen the measure of a man's self-mastery. Women should set a high standard in such matters as these.

To take the case of smoking, very few smokers realize, in the first place, how much money they expend. It is money which, if not spent, would appreciably contribute to the cost of house-keeping in not a few cases. Many a man who says he cannot afford to marry spends on tobacco and alcohol a sum quite sufficient to turn the scale. It will be argued that the smoking brings rest and peace, that it soothes, aids digestion, and so forth. But the non-smoker is not in need of these assistances: it is only the smoker who requires to smoke for these purposes.

On this point I have said, in the volume of personal hygiene which this present work is meant to succeed, all that really requires to be said. It was there pointed out that nicotine doubtless produces secondary products in the blood which require a further dose of the nicotine as an antidote to them. Therefore there is initiated a vicious circle, the details of which have been fully worked out in the case of opium, or rather, morphine. All the good results which are obtained from smoking are essentially of the nature of neutralizing the secondary effects of previous smoking. Here, then, is the scientific argument for the girl's hand if she proposes to deal with her lover on this point.

It may be added that the writer can now quote personal experience in favor of his advice. He smoked incessantly for fourteen years - from seventeen to thirty-one - his quantum being five ounces in all per week - of the strongest Egyptian cigarettes and the strongest pipe tobacco procurable. The practice did him no observable harm whatever. When he wrote the paragraph on "How to control one's smoking," in the book referred to, he was only wishing that he could control his own. At last he got disgusted with himself and stopped altogether. Personally he is neither better nor worse, but he is buying books in proportion to the money formerly wasted on tobacco, and perhaps the change is worth while. The girl who reads this book may tell her lover with confidence that it is quite possible to stop smoking, and that after a little while the craving wholly disappears.

If he has been a really confirmed, systematic smoker, he may have a very uncomfortable three weeks after he stops, but soon after that the time will come when he can stay in a room where others are smoking and not even desire to join them, which he could never have done before. He will have the advantage that he is definitely less likely to die of cancer of the mouth, more especially cancer of the tongue. That is a point which will affect his wife as well as himself. He will save a quite remarkable sum of money, and since object lessons are very valuable, he may follow the suggestion to lay it out in the form of books, as time goes on, though perhaps my reader can give him better advice from the point of view of the future housekeeper.

Of course there is the point of view expressed in a poem of Mr. Kipling's:

"A woman is only a woman,
But a good cigar is a smoke."

If a man takes that point of view he is not good enough for a woman, I think; she may remember Dogberry, Take no note of him but let him go ... and thank God she is rid of a - fool.

Certainly, I am not saying anything which will be grateful to all ears, but while we are at it, and since this book is written in the interests of women, I must say what I believe. I counsel the girl to stop her lover's smoking; a thousand times more strongly would I counsel her to stop his drinking. In a former volume on eugenics, some of the effects of parental drinking have been dealt with at length, and that subject need not be returned to here. But also from the point of view of the individual, a girl may be counseled to stop her lover's drinking. An excellent eugenic motto for a girl, as my friend Canon Horsley pointed out in discussing my paper on this subject read before the Society for the Study of Inebriety in 1909, is "the lips that touch liquor should never touch mine."

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.