ENGLISH WIVES.
THE Daily Telegraph has this year chosen for its silly season symposium the subject of English Wives, and hundreds of correspondents have been giving their opinions on English, aacompared with foreign, wives, and upon the marriage question in general. Some of the writers are clear that the chief reform that is needed is more soup. Frenchwomen give their husbands and families soup for dinner, while English- women neglect the pot-au-feu, and assail their husbands' appetites with nothing but joints. Others are indignant because Englishwomen are not sufficiently educated to share their husbands' intellectual pleasures ; while some, again, com- plain that modern wives think too much about such things, and not enough about matters of the house. Englishwomen, says one correspondent, are nothing like such good needle- women as their continental sisters ; and to prove this he mentions how he saw the wife of an Italian friend pluck some hair out of her own head and deftly mend her husband's coat, which had been torn by some accident of the street. Another aggrieved husband is very much dissatisfied because of the in- ability displayed by English wives in the matter of "handling shooting-irons," or riding an "unsaddled mule." A third retorts that English wives are just as good as French wives, if not better, and protests against the assumption that they cannot cook and mend as well as foreign wives. A fourth assumes that practically all wives are unsatisfactory, because men habitually marry the wrong women. The man has an ideal, but he seldom finds her, owing generally to the fact that she belongs to a higher social rank than he does, and he therefore weds haphazard, from fear of being left alone in his old age. With so much by way of premiss, this writer makes a very curious and obviously genuine series of confessions as to his own marriage :—" I do not say," he says, that my worser half is not a fairly affec- tionate woman. I cannot allege, as some of your corre- spondents do of their helpmate, that she has either an angelic or a demoniacal disposition. She is small-minded, as all women are ; jealous, as all women are ; sets great store upon the con- ventionalities, as most Englishwomen do; thinks her husband
might be a great deal better off if he tried to improve his position—here, again, being in agreement with many of her sex; and goes through existence with a settled conviction that he is a lucky individual to have been blessed with her, and that she was extremely good-natured and condescending to have married him." It is this last assumption which chiefly enrages the writer. He considers it as beyond dispute that the woman is the person who benefits by a marriage, and therefore the de- claration "four times a week " : "if I had listened to mother, I should never have married," sounds most unfair as well as most absurd. "She never dreams that I entertain any doubt as to the superior advantages I have enjoyed from her heroic sacrifice in sharing my home and spending five-sixths of my income." From this it will be seen that this particular hus- band has not been able to pluck up courage to enlighten his wife as to who has been the gainer by their union, and as to the fact that his ideal was and is very different. Apparently, however, he recommends the course to others. "Depend upon it, that if wives more fully appreciated that they are the favoured parties to the contract instead of the husbands, they would be chary of their everlasting sighings and implied regrets that they did not marry differently." The writer signs himself "Resignation," and of course asks that his address shall not be given. Imagine, however, the un- fortunate man's position, if by one of those unlucky accidents which happen once in fifty years in a printing office, his name or address had somehow got printed, and that his wife had detected him. He tells us that he is only allowed to smoke in his garden, as it is. After such an explosion as the accident we refer to would have created, he would not have been allowed to smoke even there. Fortunately, however, no accident did happen, and " Resignation " is safe. We wonder hat he cared to run the risk. One shudders even to think of the way in which his lamentations about his "ideal," and the girl he once met whom he thought would have fulfilled it, would have been received.
Amusing as have been individual letters in the corre- spondence, its chief interest consists in the picture of the ordinary middle-class English household that can be drawn from it when considered in the aggregate. It is clear that the point in which the English middle-class marriage most differs from the French marriage of the same class, is the unwillingness of the English husband to sink any of his own individuality in the union, and to make his wife a real partner. For example, the writers in the Daily Telegraph seem to hold that husbands do not and ought not to tell their wives their incomes. This is, we believe, in accordance with the facts. The middle- class English wife knows very little, often nothing, of her husband's affairs, and is quite in the dark as to what is the pecuniary position of the family. She knows that her husband is sometimes willing to spend, sometimes unwilling, that is all. The French wife, on the other hand, if we are to believe com- petent writers on France, habitually understands her husband's pecuniary position, and would consider herself grossly slighted if she did not enjoy his confidence in this respect. She is as often as not, indeed, the family Chancellor of the Exchequer, and knows more exactly how things stand than does her husband. The Englishman's habit of secretiveness is, we cannot help thinking, extremely unfortunate, and to it may be attributed a great deal of the extravagance and want of knowledge as to the value of money attributed, and we fear rightly attributed, to English wives. English husbands too often tell their wives nothing definite as to their incomes, and thus the wife has no means of knowing whether she must keep rigidly to her housekeeping allowance, or whether she may occasionally go a little beyond. A specially conscientious wife begins with the notion that she must save her husband from every possible expense, and, with infinite trouble to her- self, challenges every item in the weekly bills, and saves on her allowance. It may happen, however, that some accidental cir- cumstance gives her the impression that her husband is making a great deal more than she supposed. Very likely she is quite mistaken in this, but the fact that she receives the im- pression is enough. Thereupon she begins to let things go a little easier in the house, and not to be afraid of getting nice things when she wants them. Her thought is, "John, lam sure, is making more than he was, and so there is no cause to worry about little things." Yet, in fact, the time she has chosen for relaxing her efforts at economy may be the very time at which she ought to have been saving. Another evil that arises from the English plan of keeping the family income a secret from the wife, is the habit which wives fall into of coaxing their husbands to spend money. The wife who knows that the family balance is low, will feel it is im- possible to present an estimate for a new bonnet or "a lovely little cloak, which will be an economy in the end, as it will match the dress I think I shall get if Aunt Jane gives me two 115 notes, as she did last year." The wife who knows no more whether the family account is overdrawn than the kitten, will boast that she coaxed a cloak out of Jack, "although he talked for half-an-hour about Argentines and things that make one's head ache." The wife who is pecu- niarily her husband's partner, even if she is inclined to be reckless, is restrained by an exact knowledge of how things stand. When she knows as well as her husband that the account at the bank is overdrawn, she cannot ask for more -clothes. Indeed, there can then be no asking. You cannot ask for your own. Again, the wife treated on the plan of -complete confidence as to money matters, cannot shrug her shoulders when expenses are talked about, and say : "I can't understand why I can't have things as nice as other people.
am sure I don't ask for much, and you could manage per- fectly well if you weren't so mean." Such criticism, though often made quite sincerely, is obviously fatal to a happily- managed home the moment things go wrong. It tempts the husband to allow too large an expenditure out of a sort of wounded pride. He has not taken his wife into counsel when things were prosperous, and so he does not like to speak about them to her when they are going badly.
Perhaps some of our women readers, conscious that they add up the pass-book every month, will say that we are mistaken, and that Englishmen habitually tell their wives what their incomes are. No doubt the wives in the upper- classes do know, and for this reason—they have money of their own, and hence it is hardly possible to avoid what is -virtually a common purse. House-keeping allowances may be general ; but they are rather estimates and appropriations than allowances, in the stricter sense. Let any such objectors, however, recall such scraps of information as they have had about the affairs of the big tradesmen with whom they deal. They will remember how it came out when Mr. Ranter, the grocer, who was supposed to be so rich, died, that Mrs. Runter was quite unaware that he had been virtually a bank- rupt for some five years. Again, Mrs. Dennis, the retired chemist's wife, was utterly astonished to be left with a clear three thousand a year, her husband having always assured her that, if she did not save every halfpenny, they would be -certain to end their days in the Union. Besides, even in the more cultivated and richer classes, we can all remember in- .stances of women who never knew their husbands' incomes till the husband's death. Yet another proof of the commonness of the practice is to be found in the fact that the manuals on house- keeping always assume that the wife is quite ignorant of her him/ band's income, and has no responsibility in regard to expendi- ture outside her own departments Another bad result of this system is the complete ignorance of money matters displayed by most English widows. When the husband dies, the ordinary wife finds herself utterly at sea. She does not even know how to draw a cheque. She does not understand why, when, or how dividends are paid; and she has not the remotest conception of _what is a good and what a bad investment. How should she know ? Her husband has been at no pains to explain things to 'her, and she has lived on the principle enunciated by the old gentleman in the "Knight of the Burning Pestle." She never wore out a dress without an obliging dressmaker bringing another; and as for food of all kinds, it flowed into the house just as if it was laid on like gas and water. Yet the average woman can learn to understand money matters quite as well as the average man. Unfortunately, the husband is too jealous of his power to tell his wife his exact financial position, while the wife is too shy to insist on knowing, or very possibly regards it as quite a virtue not to interfere with such things. The consequences are often disastrous. Many a household would be thriftily instead of extravagantly managed if only the wife knew her husband's income; while hundreds of widows would be saved from countless worries and impositions if they realised more of the ways of money. English wives will not be perfect till their husbands share with them the mysteries of the pass-book.
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