The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book.
by Various.
_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 s.e.xes, 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 att.i.tude toward all serious things, its tendency to look the moral code straight in the eye and smash it, its belief that chast.i.ty 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 reading in their own tongue); but I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children. They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for this gravest of responsibilities.
Evidently, then, this was the school course of one of their monastic orders."
HERBERT SPENCER
This quotation from the pen of Herbert Spencer arrested our attention this winter when we were reading a number of books dealing with various epoch-making periods in the development of educational method and theory.
We closed the book and pondered over the inferences made by this leader and we began to speculate on what an antiquarian of the present period might say of our textbooks, our curricula, and our examination papers.
We hope in his search that it might be his good fortune to unearth the syllabi of some of our courses on Education for Marriage and Family Life, some of the worthwhile literature which is being written on the subject, even perhaps the _Good Housekeeping Marriage Book_. If these happened to be the only remaining record of the period, we might fancy him concluding, "Ah, what an enlightened people there must have been in the twentieth century. I perceive here preparation for real life problems. This must have been a school course for all the Youth of that generation."
This volume represents a definite step in the advancement of this ideal.
We wish to express to Dr. William F. Bigelow, former Editor of _Good Housekeeping_, our sincere appreciation for the kindly way in which he received the idea of publishing these valuable articles in permanent form and his readiness to help in every way possible in carrying this idea through to completion.
To each author we wish to express our grat.i.tude for the important contribution he has made, not only in giving new interpretation and new meaning to the inst.i.tution of marriage, but also for rendering valuable a.s.sistance in the solution of many of the problems which confront the Youth of today as they approach this most challenging, most demanding, most satisfying and most rewarding of Life"s experiences.
H. J. B.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction--Dr. William F. Bigelow v
Foreword--Helen Judy Bond vii
I. When He Comes A-Courting--Dr. Ernest R. Groves 1
II. Now That You Are Engaged--Dr. James L. McConaughy 13
III. Ought I to Marry?--Dr. Ellsworth Huntington 27
IV. Should Wives Work?--Eleanor Roosevelt 43
V. Learning to Live Together--Gladys Hoagland Groves 54
VI. Marriage Makes the Money Go--Elizabeth Bussing 66
VII. Children? Of Course!--Jessie Marshall, M. D 80
VIII. Detour Around Reno--Dr. Hornell Hart 97
IX. s.e.x Instruction in the Home--Frances Bruce Strain 111
X. Religion in the Home--William Lyon Phelps 126
XI. It Pays to be Happily Married--Stanley G. d.i.c.kinson 140
XII. The Case for Monogamy--Dr. Ernest R. Groves and Gladys H. Groves 154
_Dr. Ernest R. Groves_
CHAPTER ONE
_When He Comes A-Courting_
Never were American young people more conscious of the challenge of marriage. They are not willing to accept the idea they have often heard expressed by their elders that marriage is a lottery. Neither do they believe that when they marry, they are given a blank check which permits them to draw from the bank of happiness as they please. Instead, even though they do not know how to go about it, they feel more and more that there is something they need to do to give themselves a fair chance of achieving success. A mere acquiescent waiting for Fate to come and lead them into paradise is contrary to their spirit. They seek as best they know how some way of finding their proper mate and some means of becoming equal to the testing that even the most reckless of them in their better moments realize that marriage is sure to bring.
This fact-facing of the marriage problem shows, more fully than anything else could, how much our youth today are expecting from marriage. Even those marriages that peter out and sink to a barren drabness started out with high hopes, and, although the victims may not know what brought about their mishap, they generally feel there was blundering somewhere and that this need not have happened.
Some young people grow cynical because they are so familiar with matrimonial failures; but most of them, even when they have noticed that many of their friends are unhappily married, become more determined to find, if they can, the secret of success. This leads them to ask for help, for insight, and to become fact-seeking with a frankness that seems to be their most marked characteristic. They have not been led into this att.i.tude by any influence from their elders; they have acquired it from their own realistic approach to the marriage problem, which they clearly see has more emotional meaning than anything else that is likely to come to them through choice during their lifetime.
This request for help by young people in courtship, in engagement, in their first years of marriage, and when they plan to a.s.sume parenthood, cannot be met merely by words of caution. They do not welcome just being told what they should not do. What they seek is positive a.s.sistance.
They do not want advice, but they want information and insight. They have become convinced that there are facts about marriage that people have learned through experience, especially through the searching of the scientists, and they ask that they be given the advantage of this knowledge.
These young men and women do not take kindly to a marriage program which merely lists the qualities that one ought to find in one"s mate. Even from a very little courtship experience they come to realize that one does not desire to marry abstract virtues, however desirable, but a flesh-and-blood person whom one desperately wants. What they seek is a guidance which will keep them from wanting the kind of person they should not marry. They expect to fall in love, but hope to escape immature, untrustworthy emotions. They want to make a grown-up choice or at least to pick a mate in whose fellowship they can develop the character they know they need to achieve happiness.