A Preventive of DivorceBy Margaret O. B. Wilkinson(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)(See page 173)
By Margaret O. B. Wilkinson
(From “Parents and Their Problems.”)
(See page 173)
And here we come to the most potent of all causes of divorce—the conventionally enforced idleness of many married women—parasitism, Mrs. Schreiner calls it—and the overwork of many of our men.... The rush of our present life comes to bear most heavily on our most chivalrous. It wears them out physically and mentally and discourages them spiritually before they are fifty years of age. It gives them only time enough to nourish a vague doubt of the womanhood that is content to fatten their toil, instead of laboring staunchly with them as healthy women should do. They find their usefulness limited, their powers exhausted, and wonder why. And then, sometimes in utter weariness they throw off the yoke and try to begin again. But the women are not always wholly to blame for this condition. Sometimes with a perfectly unreasoning “I can support a wife” pride, a man will insist that a woman give up once and forever the only work in which she takes an interest, and leaves her a choice between idleness and housework in his home (which always, with or without fitness, a man will permit a woman to do)! But if a woman should say to her husband before, orsoon after marriage, “John, it does not please me that you should be a lawyer—you must become a stock broker,” or “James, when you marry me you must give up the art you love and become a carpenter,” would we not be quick to decry her injustice? Yet there are men who still say to their wives, “The work you love you must give up. You may do the work I provide or none at all.”
Of course, motherhood brings to women certain limitations, but the thing we do not recognize is that these limitations are temporary. And, if, in the ages past, women were able to combine with motherhood the most arduous physical labors, it seems probable, that, in the present and future when the demands of maternity are less rigorous, women should be able, with gain to the race, to enter new fields of labor and accomplish laudable results.
Surely there is no greater safeguard for man and woman than the work in which mind and body can delight.