One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than that. But John didn’t even think of asking Mary to share it with him.
Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It’s just in him.
It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a store window.
Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.
“After all,” thought Mary, “if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn’t live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had children—Well, there 15 you are! We surely couldn’t give our children what our children ought to have. That settles it.”
The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they were born to.
We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely imagined—like Mary and John—but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one of the large American cities:
R—— J——. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever “real sweet on” was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor De Vere’s dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his employer’s delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain 16 weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. “I like him all right,” is her notion about it, “but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can’t support me.”
S—— V——. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.
T—— V——. Sister of S—— V——, who doesn’t think much of her. She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.