Happiness and Marriage | Page 4

asking. Thousands of women are simply starving for Love and men are
either willfully blind or wholly and utterly selfish. You possibly know
that this is quite true. Another thing that has caused me many a time to
question everything: During the Christmas holidays many times I have
seen half-clad, hungry, shivering little ones gazing longingly into the
wonderful show windows, wanting probably just one toy, while
children no more worthy drive by in carriages, having more than they
want. Love, home, mother, everything; on the other hand hunger, want,
blues (many times), and both God's children. Let us hear what you have
to say about this." B. B.
Why does the mother in two-thirds of the families bear not only the

children but the burdens and heartaches? Because she is too thoughtless
and inert not to. It is easier to submit to bearing children than it is to
rise up and take command of her own body. It is easier to carry burdens
than to wake up and fire them. It is easier to "bear" things and grumble
than it is to kick over the traces and change them. To be sure, most
women are yet under the hypnotic spell of the old race belief that it is
woman's duty to "submit" herself to any kind of an old husband; but
that is just what I said--women find it easier to go through life half
asleep rather than to think for themselves. Paul says a woman is not to
think, she is to ask her husband to think for her. (At least that is what
the translators say Paul says. Privately, I have my suspicions that those
manly translators helped Paul to say a bit more than he meant to.) It is
easier to let her husband think for her even when she doesn't like his
thoughts. So she uses her brain in grumbling instead of thinking.
People who don't think are ruled by feeling. Women feel. They feel not
only for themselves but for other people. They shoulder the burdens of
the whole family and a few outside the family. They do it themselves--
because it is easier to feel than to think. Nobody walks up to a woman
and says, "Here--I have a burden that's very heavy--you carry it whilst I
go off and have a good time." No. The woman simply takes the burden
and hugs it and "feels" it--and prides herself on doing it. And maybe
the thing she hugs as a burden is no burden at all to the other people in
the family. My dear, women as a rule are chumps. They'd rather feel
anything than to think the right thing.
Now I'd like to know if you think a woman who has made herself
round- shouldered and wrinkled and sour-visaged over
burdens--anybody's burdens, real or fancied--is such a creature as
attracts love or consideration from anybody. Of course she is not. It is
no wonder she receives no love or consideration from her husband or
anybody else. She has made a pack mule out of herself for the carrying
of utterly useless burdens that nobody wants carried and the carrying of
which benefits nobody; and now that she has grown ugly and sour at
the business she need not feel surprised at being slighted. And she need
not blame folks for slighting her. She assumed the burdens; she carried
them; she wore herself out at it; it is all her own fault. It was easier for

her to feel, and grumble, than to wake up and THINK, and change
things.
Nobody who thinks will carry a single burden for even a single day. He
knows that fretting and worrying and grumbling only double the
burden and accomplish nothing.
Woman has built herself for bearing children and burdens. When she
gets tired of her bargain she will think her way out of the whole thing.
In the meantime the harder the burdens grow the more quickly she will
revolt and make of herself something besides a burden bearer.
It is all nonsense to talk about the men being "willfully blind or wholly
and utterly selfish." No man wants a burden-bearing, round- shouldered,
wrinkled and fagged-out wife. No man respects or loves a woman who
will "submit" to bearing unlimited burdens or babies either. And if a
woman "submits" and yet keeps up a continual grumbling and nagging
about it, a man simply despises her.
What every man hopes for when he marries a woman, is that she will
be a bright, trim, reasonable comrade. If she is even half-way that she
will get all the love and consideration she can long for. But in three-
quarters of the cases of marriage the woman degenerates into a whining
bundle of thought-less FEELINGS done up in a