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XVI.

WOMEN’S HUSBANDS.

WHAT THE “BREAD WINNERS” LIKE IN THEIR WIVES—­A LITTLE CONSTITUTIONAL OPPOSITION.

It would not be holding the balance of the sexes fairly, if after saying all that can be said in favor of men’s wives, we did not say something on the side of women’s husbands.  In these clever days the husband is a rather neglected animal.  Women are anxious enough to secure a specimen of the creature, but he is very soon “shelved” afterwards; and women writers are now so much occupied in contemplating the beauties of their own more impulsive sex that they neglect to paint ideals of good husbands.  There has been also too much writing tending to separate the sexes.  It is plain that in actual life all the virtues can not be on one side, and all the faults on the other; yet some women are not ashamed to write and speak as if such were really the case.  The wife is taught to regard herself as a woman with many wrongs, because her natural rights are denied her.  She is cockered up into a domestic martyr, and is bred into an impatience of reproof which is very harmful and very ungraceful.  If we look about us, we find that in our cities, especially, this is producing some very sad results.  Some of the men are getting very impatient at the increasing demands of women for attention, for place, and for consideration; and, on merely selfish grounds, it is hardly doubtful whether our women in the upper and middle classes do not demand too much.  It is evident that, as society is constituted, man is the working and woman, generally, the ornamental portion, of it, at least in those classes to which Providence or society has given what we call comfortable circumstances.  Woman may do, and does do, a great deal of unpleasant, tiresome work; she fritters away her time upon occupations which require “frittering;” but beyond that she does not do the “paying” work.  The husband, or houseband, still produces the money.  He is the poor, plain, working bee; and the queen bee too often sits in regal state in her comfortable hive while he is toiling and moiling abroad.

It results from the different occupations of the two sexes, that the husband comes home too often worried, cross, and anxious; that he finds in his wife a woman to whom he can not tell his doubts and fears, his humiliations and experience.  She, poor woman, with little sense of what the world is, without any tact, may bore him to take her to fresh amusements and excitements; for, while he has been expending both brain and body, she has been quietly at home.  A certain want of tact, not unfrequently met with in wives, often sets the household in a flame of anger and quarreling, which might be avoided by a little patience and care on the part of the wife.