FULL TEXT: HOW is it that a woman like Ethel Davis can get away with what she does? How is it that while thousands of women are steadily meeting their obligations as wives and mothers, Ethel can break every law in the book, and not be thrown out of society as the outlaw she is?
All wives have faults; so have all men. We all fail each other part of the time. A wife can be irritable when she is tired, but that may make her only the more loving and sorry when the time comes to make up. A wife may be extravagant in one glaring instance, but she is sorry for it, and a little scared, when the milliner’s bill comes in, and she makes Tom’s favorite dessert for dinner and resolves to wear that hat for two solid seasons. A wife may know that she is too fussy, or too suspicious, or too slipshod about getting the marketing and the dusting done promptly, but if she is a real wife she does try to improve, she does feel sorry for poor old Tom, she does grow spiritually year by year.
Not Ethel Davis. Ethel was completely satisfied when she married Ferd Davis seven years ago, and she is as smug as ever now. She has two children, a boy and a girl, and she talks as if no woman alive had gone through the ordeal of having children before. Ferd carries up a tray to Ethel every morning, and a high school girl comes in for 50 cents a morning and gives the children their breakfast and starts them off to nursery school. Ethel gets up at 10 and goes downtown to lunch with friends. Then it’s a beauty parlor or a movie, and late in the afternoon she and her crowd are giggling at a bar in some fashionable lounge. Perhaps then she telephones home to the woman who comes in at a dollar an hour every afternoon that she won’t be home to dinner. If she does come home it is to cuddle her babies, give them candy and toys and shriek like a siren if Ferd comes in hungry, tired and critical. The children scream too, and cling to their mother. Ferd is an outsider in his own home.
~ ‘Hates to Go on Living.’ ~
Ferd gives me this account of his marriage in a seven-page typewritten outburst. He says he's been considering everything; desertion, kidnapping his own children, divorce, suicide. He wants to know if there isn’t a tribunal where a marriage like his could be rated; isn't there any standard, any graph by which his friends could know that his rating of marital happiness is about three per cent?
“Nursery school includes lunch and naps,” writes Ferd, “and costs me $7O a month. The school girl gets $12 and old Minnie about $80. My salary is $75 a week, and commissions. Ethel cashes small checks at the grocery and drugstore about three times a week.
“Of course I can’t swing it. I sweat myself crazy for commissions; I’ve borrowed all my life insurance will carry. My father left a farm that I’m crazy about, to my bachelor brother and me; now I’m going to sell him my share. But then what? Don’t say ’talk to Ethel'; all she does is get shrill, and mad and say that I needn't think I married a servant.
“There's divorce, of course. But what of Sharon and Ferd? I’d die for my kids, but I don’t seem to know how to live for them. Is there any way out of this mess? I’ve gotten so low that I hate to go on living.”
I think there is a way out of this mess, Ferd, and you indicate yourself what it might be. Many a man could take it, when faced with your problem, but not quite so simply as you can.
~ Go to the Farm. ~
Tell Ethel that you have decided to live on the farm with the children. Any man has the right to decide that he will be a farmer instead of a city clerk. Move out there, perhaps notifying certain shops in your city that you are closing your account with them. If you must borrow to get the farm paying; borrow. Chickens and milk, potatoes and apples are bringing higher prices than they ever have in the history of the world.
Ethel will have to come with you, or leave you. Either way you will have the right to make terms. You cannot possibly take care of babies of 5 and 4 in a city apartment, but you'll have no trouble with them on a farm. The nearest farmer’s wife will run their clothes through her washing machine, and they’ll be with you all day long, in a child’s paradise.
The other day I was asked in a questionnaire what quality I thought most essential to success; that is, the worldly success of fame and wealth, independence and security. After some reflection I said “imagination.” Whether it’s running a boarding house or writing a novel, you must have imagination if you are to escape from the rut, see far enough ahead to discern a shining goal. Put your imagination to work, Ferd, upon just what this turning of the tables will mean to a selfish, extravagant, stupid wife. Get back to the soil, and give your wife every chance to accompany you. If she won’t, she forfeits income, position, home, and she cannot claim alimony. If she comes, there’s just a chance that she may wake up into real womanhood.
[Kathleen Norris, “The Selfish, Dishonest Wife,” (“Kathleen Norris Says” column; Bell Syndicate.—WNU Features), The Cambridge Sentinel (Ma.), Nov. 16, 1946, p. 6]
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