p. 12 | Talks to Wives by Mary Stewart Cutting

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Dec 27, 1906

Talks to Wives

By Mary Stewart Cutting

MARRIAGE is not a set of rules. It is a condition of life, made by the characters of the two persons who enter into it. There are homes that seem of a deadly dulness, fit to drive any man abroad; there are women whose daily conversation consists of nothing but complaint about servants, and housekeeping, and nerves, and the press of engagements, and disappointing dressmakers: complaints of lack of money, or complaints of the strain of shopping with it. There are women who are too absorbed in their children to consider the children’s father; women who have no knowledge of their husbands’ business lives beyond the fact that those husbands forget the

commissions given them in the morning, and are too tired in the evening to want to go out anywhere—a scathing fact, which somehow militates against a man. And there are women, a larger class, perhaps, than all of these, good, unselfish, loving, who lack disastrously in some fine quality of humor, of appreciation, of friendliness.

The wife who is her husband’s comrade has little to fear. It is one of the greatest factors in keeping him always hers—that of being “friends” with him—in being truly interested in all he does and plans and wishes for, and having the comrade sense of humor that can always laugh at “his” jokes and make merry by the way, instead of taking account of everything with terrible seriousness.—Mary Stewart Cutting, in Harper’s Bazar.