THE
Good Housekeeping
MARRIAGE BOOK
Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
EDITED BY
William F. Bigelow
FORMER EDITOR Good Housekeeping MAGAZINE
FOREWORD
by Helen Judy Bond
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC.
Garden City, New York
THE CONTRIBUTORS
Ernest R. Groves
James L. McConaughy
Ellsworth Huntington
Eleanor Roosevelt
Gladys Hoagland Groves
Elizabeth Bussing
Jessie Marshall
Hornell Hart
Frances Bruce Strain
William Lyon Phelps
Stanley G. Dickinson
Garden City Publishing Co. reprint edition, 1949, by special
arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by
PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Introduction
The articles that are printed in this book made what was in my opinion the most important, the most constructive, series on a single subject that Good Housekeeping has published in the quarter century and more that I was its editor. And they might so easily never have been written—just a little item in a newspaper missed, or its significance overlooked, and these sincere and helpful articles would still be locked up in the minds and hearts of the men and women who wrote them. For it all happened just like that. Students in one of the larger California universities asked that a course in marriage relations be given—and a New York newspaper heralded it with a stick of type over about page 10.
Somehow the item impressed me deeply. Here were thousands of students of both sexes, thinking of marriage, physically impelled toward marriage, admitting that they wanted more information about marriage before undertaking it. Add to these students the hundreds of thousands in other colleges and to them the millions of young men and young women outside of college—and there was Youth itself, visioning marriage as the Great Adventure, which no one should miss, but about which there were grave reports.
I have heard lots about Youth in recent years—its lackadaisical attitude toward all serious things, its tendency to look the moral code straight in the eye and smash it, its belief that chastity isn't worth its cost or success in marriage worth working for. And I had disbelieved much that I had heard, it having been my privilege to work with and for young people in high school and college over a long period of years. I knew that Youth is looking for something better than it is being given in either precept or example. And so this request of a group of college young people seemed to me to be both a challenge and an opportunity.