Daughter and Wife

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Dec 20, 1883

Daughter and Wife.

A BAD daughter seldom makes a good wife. If a girl is ill-tempered at home, snarls at her parents, snaps at her brothers and sisters, and shirks her ordinary duties, the chances are ten to one that when she gets a home of her own she will make it wretched. There are girls who fancy themselves so far superior to their parents that the mere privilege of enjoying their society in the house ought to be all the old people ought to have the assurance to ask. While their mothers are busy with domestic duties they sit in the easiest chairs, or lie on the softest sofas, feeding on cheap and trashy novels, and cherish the notion that they are very literary individuals. The household drudgery is too coarse for such fine ladies as they. The business of their parents is to provide them with nice clothes, and to be content with admiring their handsome appearance in the intervals of labor. Girls of this sort are generally very anxious to be married, that they may escape the disagreeables of a home where they are held, more or less, under subjection; therefore are smiling enough to eligible bachelors, quickly smoothing down the ugly frowns which alone they give to the members of their own families. A caller who doesn't have a chance of seeing how they behave as daughters, may be excused for fancying them lovely and lovable beings; but one who does see it is foolish to commit himself by offering marriage to a girl of this sort. She is not fit to be the wife of a worthy man. If she will not assist her mother in the domestic labors, and badgers the servants, is she not liable to be equally slothful and ill-tempered when she marries? If she now thinks herself too fine to work, is it safe to expect that her views as to that matter will radically change if she becomes a wife?