Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free."

Many a man has tired of his wife because she has not kept pace with him; because, instead of growing broader and keener as the years pass, she has become narrow. It never occurs to him that the fault may be wholly his own. In the early years of their married life he perhaps laughed at her "dreams," as he called her longings for self-improvement. He discouraged, if he did not actually oppose, every effort she made to grow to the full stature of her womanhood. His indifference or hostility quenched the hopes she had indulged before marriage. The bitterness of her disappointment crushed her spirit. She lost her buoyancy and enthusiasm and gradually sank to the level of a household drudge. And the husband wonders what has changed the joyous, high-spirited girl he married into the dull, apathetic woman who now performs her duties like an automaton.

There are to-day thousands of wives doing the work of ordinary housemaids, who, putting it on a low standard, are smothering ability to earn perhaps more money than the men who enslave them, if they only had an opportunity to unfold the powers which God has given them; but they have been brought up from infancy to believe that marriage is the only real career for a woman, that these longings and hungerings for self-expression are to be smothered, covered up by the larger duties of a wife and mother.

If the husbands could change places with their wives for a year, they would feel the contracting, narrowing influence in which the average wife lives. Their minds would soon cease to reach out, they would quickly feel the pinching, paralyzing effect of the monotonous existence, of doing the same things every day, year in and year out. The wives, on the other hand, would soon begin to broaden out. Their lives would become richer, fuller, more complete, from contact with the world, from the constant stretching of their minds over large problems.

I have heard men say that remaining in the home on Sundays or holidays just about uses them up; that it is infinitely harder and more trying than the same time spent in their occupations, and that while they love their children their incessant demands, the noise and confusion would drive them to drink if they had to bear it all the time. Strong men admit that they can not stand these little nerve-racking vexations of the home. Yet they wonder why the wife and mother is nervous, and seem to think that she can bear this sort of thing three hundred and sixty-five days in the year without going away and getting relief for a half-dozen days during the whole time. Few men would exchange places with their wives. Their hours are shorter, and when their day's work is done, it is done, while a wife and mother not only works all day, but is also likely to be called during the night. If any one is disturbed in the night by the children, it is the mother; rarely the father.

How long would men continue to conduct their business offices or factories with the primitive, senseless methods in vogue in the average kitchen to-day? Man puts all his inventiveness, his ingenuity, in improving methods, in facilitating his business and getting the drudgery out of his work in his office and factory, but the wife and mother still plods along in an ill-fitted kitchen and laundry. And yet our greatest modern inventor has said that the cares of the home could be reduced to a minimum and the servant problem solved if the perfectly practicable devices, for lightening household labor were adopted in the home!

"But," many of our men readers will say, "is there any profession in the world grander than that of home making? Can anything be more stimulating, more elevating, than home making and the rearing of children? How can such a vocation be narrowing or monotonous?"

Of course it is grand. There is nothing grander in the universe than the work of a true wife, a noble mother. But it would require the constitution of a Hercules, an infinitely greater patience than that of a Job, to endure such work with almost no change or outside variety, year in and year out, as many wives and mothers do, without breaking down.

The average man does not appreciate how almost devoid of incentives to broadmindedness, to many-sidedness, to liberal growth, the home life of many women is.

There is a disease called arrested development, in which the stature of the adult remains that of a child, all physical growth and expansion having stopped.