What a Young Wife Ought to Know. Emma F. Angell Drake

for the husband, by his loving considerateness to win you away from fearfulness to a sure confidence in himself.

      Many otherwise kind men have become possessed with the thought that every right is theirs immediately; and in their inconsiderate, rapacious passion, in the speedy consummation of marriage, at whatever cost of pain or wounded feeling on the part of her whom they have taken to love and honor, they well nigh wreck the after happiness of both in the first days of their united lives.

      Husband beware of the wrong of committing a veritable outrage upon the person of her whom God has given you as your companion, and suffering ever after the stings of remorse, that she never again can feel the same respect and love for you that she could, had you been more considerate of her feelings and desires.

      It will be difficult for her to be persuaded that the animal nature does not control and dominate your love for her, rather than the higher instincts of the soul.

      It would be far better for every prospective bride if she suspects that the man who is to be her husband has not been informed in these things in a wholesome way, either herself, or through the intervention of a friend to put into his hands books that will teach him wisely and well these things upon which so much of his happiness depends.

      I wish it were binding upon every young man before he stands at the marriage altar, to read carefully and painstakingly Dr. Stall’s books for young men and young husbands. With the earnest words and teachings of these books ringing in their hearts they could hardly live careless lives, or make the mistakes which, in ignorance of the great truths he inculcates, they might otherwise do.

CHAPTER IV.

       THE CHOICE OF A HUSBAND.

       Table of Contents

      Higher Standards are Being set up in the Choice of a Husband.—Should be Worthy of both Love and Respect.—Love Likely to Idealize the Man.—The Real Characteristics Necessary.—Deficiencies in Character not to be Supplied After Marriage.—The Right to Demand Purity.—Young Men Who “Sow Wild Oats.”—Importance of Good Health.—Weaknesses and Diseases Which Descend from Parents to Children.—The Parents’ Part in Aiding to a Wise Choice.—The Value of the Physician’s Counsel.—One Capable of Supporting Wife and Children.—A Dutiful Son Makes a Good Husband.—Essential Requisites Enumerated.—The Father Reproduced in His Children.—The Equivalents Which the Wife Should bring to her Husband.

      “Each generation of young men and women comes to the formation of sex union with higher and higher demands for a true marriage, with ever growing needs for companionship. Each generation of men and women need and ask more of each other. A woman is no longer content to have a ‘kind husband’: a man is no longer content to have a patient Griselda.”—Charlotte Perkins Stetson.

      “Who weds for love alone may not be wise:

      Who weds without it angels must despise.

      Love and respect together must combine,

      To render marriage holy and divine:

      And lack of either, sure as fate, destroys

      Continuation of the nuptial joys,

      And brings regret and gloomy discontent

      To put to rout each tender sentiment.”

      —Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

      What shall be the ruling characteristics of the man I shall marry? is the question that every young girl has answered long before she may be conscious of it herself. As one and another of her acquaintances marry, she mentally concludes that this and that trait which the new bridegroom possesses, would not do at all were she the bride. And so year after year the mental, moral, and physical make-up of the man she is to choose, grows into completeness, as this imaginary being is shaped to her liking.

      James Lane Allen says truly, “Ideals are of two kinds. There are those that correspond to our highest sense of perfection. They express what we might be were life, the world, ourselves, all different and better. Such ideals are like lighthouses; but like lighthouses are not made to live in, but for beacons. Neither can we live in such ideals. But there are ideals of another sort. It is these that are to burn for us, not like lighthouses in the distance, but like candles in our hands to light each step of the way.”

      When you began to love you began to idealize the man you loved, and the danger is with most women, that the ideal is so near perfection that the reality brings to them a rude and dangerous awakening. Dangerous, because they allow the ideal to usurp the place which belongs to the real, and because all the way along they are comparing the real in lover and husband, with the ideal.

      Therefore, dear, remember that you are human, and since the real, not the ideal matches your human nature, expect the man who chooses you, and whom you choose, to be human also.

      But there are certain characteristics, certain soul-possessions, that every young woman, if she herself be really fitted for matrimony, has a right to expect; nay more, to demand, of the man she chooses. Discovering that these are lacking, let her not cheat herself with the belief that she can, after marriage, school him in these missing qualities until they are fixed traits, for the rule does not read that way. The time for easy implantation of fixed characteristics is gone, and whatever is now taken on, is apt to set uneasily. What sins and gross faults are coaxed down after marriage are very apt to leave glaring scars, both in the husband’s character and in the wife’s soul.

      The wife has a right to expect that the man she marries shall be as pure as herself, and she has a right to know it. How can she know it? If she cannot devise a way to know this for a certainty, as she values her happiness, let her take no step further. Better by far, single blessedness, than marriage with a moral leper.

      That many of the young men who move in so-called first-class society, are moral lepers, is as true as lamentable. The complacency with which so many parents have said, with an assumed sigh, “Young men must sow their wild oats,” has prepared the soil for this waywardness to thrive in, and the condoning which such sins receive when found in young men, has cultivated the contagiousness until its prevalence is alarming in the extreme.

      Let her beware that she choose not her husband, through sentiment alone. Sentiment is an unwise guide and always purblind.

      Should health be a consideration in choosing a husband? Most assuredly. Were the fortunes of none of the human family, save yourselves, affected by your choice, it would make less difference; but while with this generation lies in large measure the health and happiness of the next, the question of health in matrimony is one of great importance.

      When it is no longer a disputed question that consumption, cancer, scrofula, insanity, and a host of lesser ills, are transmitted from generation to generation, any thoughtful young woman will consider her responsibility in the matter in question. If you have the spirit of the martyrs in you, and are prepared to give your life to nursing your husband and children, even this self-abnegation will not atone for the wrong of thrusting upon the world more degenerates.

      You would need to trace the history of only one such family through a few generations, to note the mental, moral and physical degeneration, which results from the union of invalids. Even where but one of the parents is unhealthy, it is a sad part of the law of heredity, that the children more often follow the weaker parent, rather than the stronger.

      Dr. Guernsey, a well-known medical writer, says: “Young men marrying with the slightest taint of syphilis in the blood, will surely transmit the disease to their children. Beside this, thousands of abortions transpire every year from this cause alone, the poison being so destructive as to kill the child in-utero, before it is matured for birth; and even if the child is born alive, it is liable to break down with the most loathsome disorders, and to die during dentition. The few that survive this period are short-lived and unhealthy so long as they do live.”

      Knowing this, is it not true that too much has been said derogatory to the