Etiquette for a Wise Wife
WHAT is etiquette? How can a girl improve her manners and become a more likable social creature? Those questions come to me in almost every mail. I think a new book has all the answers.
Margaret Fishback combines rare good judgment and a sense of humor in her “Safe Conduct.” She speaks of etiquette in modern terms.
“In etiquette there is certainly no last word. no supreme authority on any subject,” she writes. “Etiquette is, rather, the behavior of the majority in any given age or place, plus a fundamental civilized desire to please.”
Miss Fishback pokes fun at some of the “ladylike” books of etiquette that teach snobbery instead of simple good manners. And she also gives some brutally honest advice to wives who hate to see their hard-working husbands take a night off now and then to be with “the boys.”
This section expresses my own feelings so well, that I quote from it, urging all loving and sometimes misguided wives to listen attentively.
“One of the things that frighten so much good masculine material out of the fold of matrimony is the sight of a once-free spirit whose wife has him under her thumb. There are many wives-loving, affectionate ones too- who have a particular aversion to seeing their husbands enjoy any good time without them.
“It isn't a matter of good times involving other women. What these wives resent is the innocent masculine evening, when the boys just want to get together and drink too much and push one another around and play poker and sing raucously and tell boarding-school jokes.
“A wife should try to be sympathetic toward this valiant effort of man to regain his lost youth. She should let him have his fling every little while, if he wants to, instead of smiling the martyred I'll-be-all-right-tomorrow smile, with the terribly, terribly hurt look in her eye that means she is grieved to find he should ever want to spend an evening away from his loving wife and the family hearth.
“The wife who puts on that kind of act is likely to become one of those I-never-have- any-fun women, who are such hair shirts to the masculine sex. Most of this species have nice homes, and books to read, and friends to play with, while Pop is out bread-winning. Yet they complain of their hard lot, which is bad marital strategy, because at first it bewilders a man, then the injustice of it irritates him, and that's when the bickering begins.
“So, after you snare your man, remember the girls who are still on the town, and don't frighten the surviving eligible males. If, after wedlock, a man may still call his soul just half his own, the other half will be dedicated with his compliments to the wife who continues to be as starry-eyed when her Benedict appears at the end of a hard day at the office, as she was during courtship.
“The perfect woman is the one who doesn't nag, or play the martyr, or deliberately incite jealousy, or display a jealous heart.” –San Bernardino Sun, 1938
“One of the things that frighten so much good masculine material out of the fold of matrimony is the sight of a once-free spirit whose wife has him under her thumb. There are many wives-loving, affectionate ones too- who have a particular aversion to seeing their husbands enjoy any good time without them.
“It isn't a matter of good times involving other women. What these wives resent is the innocent masculine evening, when the boys just want to get together and drink too much and push one another around and play poker and sing raucously and tell boarding-school jokes.
“A wife should try to be sympathetic toward this valiant effort of man to regain his lost youth. She should let him have his fling every little while, if he wants to, instead of smiling the martyred I'll-be-all-right-tomorrow smile, with the terribly, terribly hurt look in her eye that means she is grieved to find he should ever want to spend an evening away from his loving wife and the family hearth.
“The wife who puts on that kind of act is likely to become one of those I-never-have- any-fun women, who are such hair shirts to the masculine sex. Most of this species have nice homes, and books to read, and friends to play with, while Pop is out bread-winning. Yet they complain of their hard lot, which is bad marital strategy, because at first it bewilders a man, then the injustice of it irritates him, and that's when the bickering begins.
“So, after you snare your man, remember the girls who are still on the town, and don't frighten the surviving eligible males. If, after wedlock, a man may still call his soul just half his own, the other half will be dedicated with his compliments to the wife who continues to be as starry-eyed when her Benedict appears at the end of a hard day at the office, as she was during courtship.
“The perfect woman is the one who doesn't nag, or play the martyr, or deliberately incite jealousy, or display a jealous heart.” –San Bernardino Sun, 1938
🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia
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