FROM THE ARCHIVES:A series of Lenten talks by Jesuit priest Rev Charles Doyle, on the subject of the home attracted such a large attendance at St Francis Xavier's Church in Dublin's Upper Gardiner Street in 1928 that "loud speakers" were required so that many who couldn't see the preacher could hear him. His subject in the third lecture was Queen of the Home. –
IT TOO frequently happened, said the lecturer, that married couples did not always find themselves well matched. The husband before long found that the romance of courtship had fled, that the feverish desire of possession was gone and the woman discovered the man was an ordinary, prosaic, imperfect individual.
As the wife could not afford to be unhappy, she should begin seriously the business of adaptation. Life was too precious to be thrown away in secret regrets or open differences. The wife should love her husband, but the love need not be the soft, sweet love of pre-marriage days. Let the woman be subject to her husband.
It was common experience that in almost every phase of life woman clung to man, and needed his help and protection. There was nothing menial in that dependency, nothing that detracted from woman’s dignity in the slightest. The true relation between man and woman was the quality of dependence. In married life, man was as subject to woman as woman to man.
It was the woman’s mission to regulate the house; to make the husband happy and, above all, to make a man of him. The moment a woman tried to throw off dominion and sought to rival a man, she quarrelled with God’s design and unsexed herself. That however, did not mean that the wife should not have a voice and hand in the affairs of the family business. Two heads were better than one, and woman’s head would often think quicker and see farther than man’s brain and eyes.
In the presence of their wives, most husbands were like clay in the hands of the potter, ready to take any shape that the least skilful potter wished. After all, in the family firm the husband was the senior partner, and should have the last word and say. The love and obedience that a wife gave to her husband gave her a claim on his time and society. She was under an obligation to make the home pleasant but, were the home ever so sweet and pleasant, every man has a desire for an hour of social freedom to mix with his fellows.
Here precisely was danger for the wife – for the young wife especially. She had been alone all day and she thought that her husband should spend the evening with her. She became cross and exacting. It irritated the man to think that his wife desired to monopolise him.
“I have sympathy,” said the lecturer, “with the wife who has married a golf fiend, unless she happens to be a golf fiend herself, which a woman with a family to look after has no business to be. Of course, golf in moderation is a harmless and innocent occupation, except for the bad language to which it gives rise when a man misses his stroke, but if a man starts thinking and talking and dreaming golf, when he makes golf an idol, oh, then he . . . becomes a perfect brute.”
On the other hand, if the wife wanted to keep her husband from golf, from girls and from Guinness, she must seek more effective means than reproaches and tears – she must make the home clean and neat and comfortable. If girls knew as much about cooking as they did of the different ways of doing up their hair and powdering their noses, there would not be so many marriage failures.
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