What a Young Wife Ought to Know

by Emma F. Angell Drake

When you began to love you began to idealize the man you loved, and the danger is with most women, that the ideal is so near perfection that the reality brings to them a rude and dangerous awakening. Dangerous, because they allow the ideal to usurp the place which belongs to the real, and because all the way along they are comparing the real in lover and husband, with the ideal.

Therefore, dear, remember that you are human, and since the real, not the ideal matches your human nature, expect the man who chooses you, and whom you choose, to be human also.

But there are certain characteristics, certain soul-possessions, that every young woman, if she herself be really fitted for matrimony, has a right to expect; nay more, to demand, of the man she chooses. Discovering that these are lacking, let her not cheat herself with the belief that she can, after marriage, school him in these missing qualities until they are fixed traits, for the rule does not read that way. The time for easy implantation of fixed characteristics is gone, and whatever is now taken on, is apt to set uneasily. What sins and gross faults are coaxed down after marriage are very apt to leave glaring scars, both in the husband’s character and in the wife’s soul.

The wife has a right to expect that the man she marries shall be as pure as herself, and she has a right to know it. How can she know it? If she cannot devise a way to know this for a certainty, as she values her happiness, let her take no step further. Better by far, single blessedness, than marriage with a moral leper.

That many of the young men who move in so-called first-class society, are moral lepers, is as true as lamentable. The complacency with which so many parents have said, with an assumed sigh, “Young men must sow their wild oats,” has prepared the soil for this waywardness to thrive in, and the condoning which such sins receive when found in young men, has cultivated the contagiousness until its prevalence is alarming in the extreme.

Let her beware that she choose not her husband, through sentiment alone. Sentiment is an unwise guide and always purblind.

Should health be a consideration in choosing a husband? Most assuredly. Were the fortunes of none of the human family, save yourselves, affected by your choice, it would make less difference; but while with this generation lies in large measure the health and happiness of the next, the question of health in matrimony is one of great importance.

When it is no longer a disputed question that consumption, cancer, scrofula, insanity, and a host of lesser ills, are transmitted from generation to generation, any thoughtful young woman will consider her responsibility in the matter in question. If you have the spirit of the martyrs in you, and are prepared to give your life to nursing your husband and children, even this self-abnegation will not atone for the wrong of thrusting upon the world more degenerates.

You would need to trace the history of only one such family through a few generations, to note the mental, moral and physical degeneration, which results from the union of invalids. Even where but one of the parents is unhealthy, it is a sad part of the law of heredity, that the children more often follow the weaker parent, rather than the stronger.

Dr. Guernsey, a well-known medical writer, says: “Young men marrying with the slightest taint of syphilis in the blood, will surely transmit the disease to their children. Beside this, thousands of abortions transpire every year from this cause alone, the poison being so destructive as to kill the child in-utero, before it is matured for birth; and even if the child is born alive, it is liable to break down with the most loathsome disorders, and to die during dentition. The few that survive this period are short-lived and unhealthy so long as they do live.”