On Choosing a Husband : Part 6

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

(Page 21 of 27)

There are always plenty of people to sneer at the teetotaler; people who make money out of drink naturally do so; people who drink themselves naturally do so; the unmarried girl may do so, thinking that the teetotaler is a prig and not quite a man. But there is one great class of the community, the most important of all, which does not sneer at teetotalers, and that is the wives. They know better, no, they know best, and their verdict stands and will remain against that of all others. I am now addressing the girl who may become a wife, and I tell her most solemnly that from her point of view she cannot afford to laugh at the teetotaler; and if she can stop her lover's drinking, whether he drinks much or little, she will do well for him and herself. She should know what the effect of alcohol is upon a man, and she should have imagination enough to realize that his hot breath, coming unwelcome, will not be more palatable in the future for its flavoring of whisky.

It may be admitted that in saying all this the interests of the future are perhaps paramount in my mind. I am trying to do a service to the principle, "Protect parenthood from alcohol," which I advocate as the first and most urgent motto for the real temperance reformer. Yet the question of parenthood may be entirely left out of consideration, and even so the advice here given to the girl about to choose a husband - alas, that only a small proportion of maidenhood can be in that fortunate state, which is yet the right and natural one! - is warranted and more than warranted. We may go so far as to declare that it is a great duty, laid upon the young womanhood of civilization, to protect itself and the future, and to serve its own contemporary manhood, by taking up this attitude towards alcohol. Would that this great missionary enterprise were now unanimously undertaken by these most effective and cogent of missionaries, whose own happiness so largely depends upon its success!

Of course it should not be necessary for any man to set forth, for the instruction of girlhood, the qualities which it should value in men. All who train and teach girlhood and form its ideals should devote themselves scarcely less to this than to the inculcation of high ideals for girlhood itself; yet it is not done. We do not yet recognize the supreme importance of the marriage choice for the present and for the future.

Fortunately, if Nature alone gets a fair chance, she teaches the girl that a man should "play the game," and should not be afraid of "having a go," that of the two classes into which, as one used to tell a little girl, people are divided - those who "stick to it," and those who do not - the former are the worthy for her. But Nature is specially handicapped by stupid convention, not least in Anglo-Saxon countries, as regards a woman's estimation of tenderness in a man. The parental instinct with its correlate emotion of tenderness, is the highest of existing things, and though it is less characteristic of men than of women, it is none the less supreme when men exhibit it. In days to come, when women can choose, as they should be able to choose today, they may well be counseled to use as a touchstone of their suitor's quality that line of Wordsworth, "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees." A man who thinks that "rot" is rot, or soon will be.

But in the minds of men and women there is a half implicit assumption that tenderness is incompatible with manliness. "Let not women's weapons, water-drops, stain my man's cheeks," says Lear. But it is quite possible for a man to be manly and yet tender, and to the highest type of women it is the combination of strength and tenderness in a man that appeals beyond aught else.

It has always seemed to the present writer that the followers of Christ have done him far less than justice in insisting upon one aspect of his character disproportionately with another. They speak of him as the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild "; they tend to describe him as almost or wholly effeminate; and the representations of him in art, with small, feminine and conspicuously un-Jewish features, with long feminine hair and the hands of a consumptive woman, join with sacred poetry in furthering this impression. Nothing can be truer than that he was tender, and that he had a passion for childhood and realized, as we may dare to say, its divinity, as only the very few in any age have done.

But this "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," was also he whose blazing words against established iniquity and hypocrisy constitute him the supreme exemplar not only of love but of moral indignation, and of a sublime invective which has been equaled not even by Dante at his highest. We forget, perhaps, when we use such a phrase as "whitened sepulcher," that we are quoting the untamable fierceness, the courage, fatal and vital, of the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who was murdered not for loving children, but for hating established wickedness. Why have Christians not recognized that it is this perhaps unexampled combination of strength and tenderness which makes their Founder worthy for all time to be regarded as the Highest of Mankind?

One more counsel to the girl who can choose. It is contained in the saying of Marcus Aurelius that the worth of a man may be measured by the worth of the things to which he devotes his life.

We must now pass to consider the sociological fact that, under present conditions, the sole use of this chapter for a very large proportion of women can merely consist in suggesting to them that they are better unmarried than married without love. It is not possible for them to exercise the great function of choice which is theirs by natural right. Evil and ominous of more evil are whatever facts deprive woman of this her birthright.

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