The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book

Good Housekeeping Marriage
Book, by Various

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Title: The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book
Author: Various
Editor: William F. Bigelow
Release Date: March 15, 2007 [EBook #20830]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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MARRIAGE BOOK ***

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THE Good Housekeeping MARRIAGE BOOK

THE CONTRIBUTORS
Ernest R. Groves James L. McConaughy Ellsworth Huntington Eleanor
Roosevelt Gladys Hoagland Groves Elizabeth Bussing Jessie Marshall
Hornell Hart Frances Bruce Strain William Lyon Phelps Stanley G.
Dickinson

THE
Good Housekeeping
MARRIAGE BOOK7
Twelve Steps to a Happy Marriage
EDITED BY William F. Bigelow FORMER EDITOR Good
Housekeeping MAGAZINE
FOREWORD by Helen Judy Bond
GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. Garden City, New York

Garden City Publishing Co. REPRINT EDITION, 1949, by special
arrangement with Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Copyright, 1938, by PRENTICE-HALL, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE
REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM, BY MIMEOGRAPH OR ANY
OTHER MEANS, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM
THE PUBLISHERS.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

William F. Bigelow
Introduction
The articles that are printed in this book made what was in my opinion
the most important, the most constructive, series on a single subject
that Good Housekeeping has published in the quarter century and more
that I was its editor. And they might so easily never have been
written--just a little item in a newspaper missed, or its significance
overlooked, and these sincere and helpful articles would still be locked
up in the minds and hearts of the men and women who wrote them. For
it all happened just like that. Students in one of the larger California
universities asked that a course in marriage relations be given--and a
New York newspaper heralded it with a stick of type over about page
10.
Somehow the item impressed me deeply. Here were thousands of
students of both sexes, thinking of marriage, physically impelled
toward marriage, admitting that they wanted more information about
marriage before undertaking it. Add to these students the hundreds of
thousands in other colleges and to them the millions of young men and
young women outside of college--and there was Youth itself, visioning
marriage as the Great Adventure, which no one should miss, but about
which there were grave reports.
I have heard lots about Youth in recent years--its lackadaisical attitude
toward all serious things, its tendency to look the moral code straight in
the eye and smash it, its belief that chastity isn't worth its cost or
success in marriage worth working for. And I had disbelieved much
that I had heard, it having been my privilege to work with and for
young people in high school and college over a long period of years. I
knew that Youth is looking for something better than it is being given
in either precept or example. And so this request of a group of college
young people seemed to me to be both a challenge and an opportunity.
I accepted the challenge. The next step was to find out how best to meet
it. It seemed to me that to offer our young people anything less than the
best that I could get would be letting them down. So I turned for advice

to several college men who had made a long study of the problems
involved in marriage, and from the various lists of subjects and authors
suggested--adding a few of my own--selected the group now presented
in permanent form in this book. If these articles make success in
marriage seem something that must constantly be worked for, they at
the same time show that success, plus the happiness that goes with it,
can be achieved. Which is all, I think, that any man or woman has a
right to ask for.
WILLIAM F. BIGELOW

Helen Judy Bond
Foreword
If by some strange chance, not a vestige of us descended to the remote
future save a pile of our schoolbooks or some examination papers, we
may imagine how puzzled an antiquarian of the period would be on
finding in them no indication that the learners were ever likely to be
parents. "This must have been the curriculum for their celibates," we
may fancy him concluding. "I perceive here an elaborate preparation
for many things; especially for reading the books of extinct nations and
of coexisting nations (from which, indeed, it seems clear that these
people had very little worth