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feel anything
than to think the right thing. Now I'd like
to know if you think a woman who has made herself round- shouldered and
wrinkled and sour-visaged over burdens - anybody's burdens, real
or fancied - is such a creature as attracts love or consideration
from anybody. Of course she is not. It is no wonder she receives no
love or consideration from her husband or anybody else. She has made a
pack mule out of herself for the carrying of utterly useless burdens that
nobody wants carried and the carrying of which benefits nobody; and
now that she has grown ugly and sour at the business she need not feel
surprised at being slighted. And she need not blame folks for slighting
her. She assumed the burdens; she carried them; she wore herself
out at it; it is all her own fault. It was easier for her to feel, and
grumble, than to wake up and THINK, and change things. Nobody who
thinks will carry a single burden for even a single day. He knows that
fretting and worrying and grumbling only double the burden and accomplish
nothing. Woman has
built herself for bearing children and burdens. When she gets tired of
her bargain she will think her way out of the whole thing. In the
meantime the harder the burdens grow the more quickly she will revolt
and make of herself something besides a burden bearer. It is all
nonsense to talk about the men being "willfully blind or wholly and
utterly selfish." No man wants a burden-bearing, round- shouldered,
wrinkled and fagged-out wife. No man respects or loves a woman who will
"submit" to bearing unlimited burdens or babies either. And if a woman
"submits" and yet keeps up a continual grumbling and nagging about
it, a man simply despises her. What every man
hopes for when he marries a woman, is that she will be a bright,
trim, reasonable comrade. If she is even half-way that she will get all
the love and consideration she can long for. But in three- quarters of
the cases of marriage the woman degenerates into a whining bundle of
thought-less FEELINGS done up in a slattern's dress and smelling like
a drug-shop. Her husband in despair gives up trying to understand
her, or to love her either. The woman in
such a case is apt to suffer most. Why not? She makes it the business
of her life to "suffer." She prides herself on how much she has had to
"suffer," and "bear." She cultivates her
"feelings" to the limit. A
man thinks it "unmanly" to give way to "feelings." So he uses all his
wits to keep from doing so, and to enable him to hide his own
disappointment and make the best of life as he finds it. A man uses his
best judgment when he meets disappointment. A woman trots out her
"feelings" and her best pocket-handkerchief, and calls in
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