The Wife’s Influence by Mary Stewart Cutting

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 10, 1907

The Wife’s Influence

By Mary Stewart Cutting

EVERY married woman, no matter how limited her life may seem, no matter how shut up she may be in the nursery or the kitchen, has a means of contact with the great world in the man who goes out into it—has a means of influence on it through him. Seen or unseen, it is there. The man who is happy in his home carries the atmosphere of it with him; he is himself more in touch with others because of it. In this day and age when so many women are seeking scope for their powers in arts and professions and business careers, there are some who realize that in their marriages there is the very widest scope—women who put the enthusiasm, the brain-power, the artistic perception, the clear-sighted effort into their profession as wives and mothers, mistresses of households. These are the women who use their brains and their souls to love with, as well as their hearts, and who wield an extraordinary far-reaching power, all the greater because that power is the last thing they are thinking of or seek to attain. That intangible thing that we call the spirit of the home walks abroad with every member of it. The “nice” children in school gravitate instantly toward the children of that household, gravitate toward the house itself, because there is something there that they need.—Mary Stewart Cutting, in Harper’s Bazaar.