p. 12 | The Wife in the Home

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 30, 1906

The Wife in the Home

A MAN is always better for having a standard to attain, and that standard is never so effective as when it is fixed for him by his wife. The plane on which a home rests at the very outset has a very important bearing on its future.

The desire to be of actual help to a husband in his daily life is generally one of the keenest and earliest desires of the young wife, and she vaguely wonders how she can help him. This can be done by love and sympathy, purely and mainly. The greatest power to a man in the outer world is the love that he gets from his wife in his home. The greatest help he receives in his work is her honest sympathy in his interests. That may not seem like doing anything actual to the young wife. But it is actual. A man was made to work, and he can stand a goodly share of it when his home is made happy for him, and when he knows that loving sympathy awaits him at the close of the day. It may not seem like taking a tangible share in a man's work, but it is.

I confess I am not enthusiastic over a wife's actual part in her husband's business. There are undoubtedly instances where this is wise and necessary. But where conditions are favorable to a possible division, it is wiser that each should remain in his and her own sphere. And I am inclined to believe, if we all regarded housekeeping as the fine art that it really is, that this division of labor would seem more natural.

Intelligent Companionship

Such spare time as she may have from her household duties she will be wise if she devote to her self-advancement. For no wife starts aright if she becomes, at the very beginning, a slave to her household god, with no time for her mental and spiritual improvement. Her husband, by reason of his daily touch with the outer world, unconsciously absorbs and naturally learns. He broadens the scope of his horizon constantly. His wife must keep pace with him. There is no sight quite so sad and so certain of future estrangement as to see a husband advance in the world, with his wife either standing still or lagging behind. Intelligent companionship is a great source of strength in happy married life. A woman can make the four walls of a home a prison or a university. If she excludes everything from her mind except her pans and kettles, she becomes a drudge. But if she reserves to herself a part of each day for her self-improvement, as it is possible to do if she will but manage aright, and as it is the duty of every woman to do, she is truest to herself and to her husband.—Ladies' Home Journal.