WIDOWHOOD
The older you are the greater risk to your happiness, and even to your peace, there is in marriage. I cannot conceive of a husband revolving comfortably in the widow’s orbit I have measured off and made for myself. Least of all can I conceive of his sitting still in it with any peace of mind. I suppose many other women feel the same way, else there would not be four times as many widows as widowers in this country, according to the United States census.
A widower is probably the most transient manifestation of man there is among us. I have often wondered why this is so. I am no alienist, which is now that supreme authority among us for determining our character and conduct according to our glands; but my suspicion is that marriage once contracted becomes a habit with a man, and that he is the most invincible habit-forming creature on this earth.
You may feed one only three articles of food for a year and he will stick to them as long as he lives! I knew one who cured himself of indigestion twenty years ago by taking a cup of tea and two pieces of dried apricot for lunch. He has never varied his midday meal from that day to this. If his wife died, I suppose he would marry again precisely as he goes to his club and orders that cup of tea and the preserved apricots for lunch.
On the other hand, marriage is a state of love for women--barring the alimony class, of course--and they are so narrow and personal in their devotion that they do not so readily transfer their allegiance to another husband. Apparently they are not so enterprising or broad-minded in their romantic emotions as men are, though we seem to be widening out considerably in these latter years. It would not surprise me if the time comes when even widows may become obsolete, and we shall have no such wisdom among us as a sad, sweet-faced elderly woman wearing her widow’s weeds and sitting in the amen corner, or ambling about doing good deeds in the neighborhood. She may have her second or third husband and be engaged in a campaign for a better sewerage system in the city where she lives.
What I mean is that we seem to be growing more like men mentally and morally every day and in every way. I reckon it is all for the best, but it does feel queer if you are a woman and a widow who cannot keep up with the quick step of your times and know yourself to be dwindling away into the narrow, withered-faced relict of your former husband.
I remember one day years ago, decorating myself with such ladylike views as these in a conversation with Mark Sullivan, who had just refused a story I offered for Collier’s Magazine. He listened kindly and patiently until I had probably exhausted my repertoire of noble sentiments for that day. Then he seized his hat and made for the door, thought better of it, paused, looked back at me curiously and delivered himself of this warning:
‘You may be that good, but if you are, you are bound to be lonesome.’
For a moment I experienced some kind of faint alarm, as sinners must when the preacher gives them one last chance at the end of a revival to repent and be free men. It occurred to me that I had better hurry out while the spirit moved me and do something rash. But I could think of nothing sane, discreet, and becoming to do that would also be rash. I am not so sure it is conscience that makes cowards of us all. It may be the vanity of self-respect that holds us in check.
After all, I have not been so very lonely, only slightly peeved as I grow older at the implication of having lived a narrow, dreary life.
Years ago, after the death of my husband, I adopted one of the milder sins of our times, much as my mother, who was a very frugal woman, used to be wasteful with pins because she insisted that a little inexpensive extravagance was good for the soul. I do not know about that; but I am still so ashamed of my transgression I will not confess it, although with a discerning eye you may see it for yourself as one of the complimentary details in the picture on the frontispiece page of ‘My Book and Heart.’ Otherwise I am far behind my times in yielding to temptations.
If you had only one lover when you were a girl, and married him, and if you lived very quietly with him until death parted you, not taking in more than the spiritual edges of the world, you do not know men; you know only one man. As to the rest, you know some by their reputations--some good, some not good; some who will lead in prayer. The great majority are beyond your ken because they will not lead in prayer, nor contribute to foreign missions, nor even to the pastor’s salary. If you have been a preacher’s wife for nearly a quarter of a century, you entertain a vague suspicion of such men without having any information about their real characters.
This is what happened to me as long as Lundy lived. A man was a sheep or a goat, and that was the limit of my powers of classification; a very remote way of thinking about them.
I do not know how it may be with other widows. I suppose if they have a competency, and can afford to employ an agent to look after their affairs, they frequently retain their social and romantic ideals of these wonderful beings and remain peacefully ignorant of their sterner manifestations. But if you must earn your own livelihood and manage your own affairs, you will discover that you come face to face and hand to hand with men every day in every way upon a totally different basis. You cannot practice the arts and policies which made you so successful in managing your dear husband, not if you mean to be an honest, upstanding widow. Your mourning veil may appeal to their compassion, but it will have practically no effect upon loosening up their business sense in your favor. What is more to the point, it is a sly, unfair way of playing upon their sex or your sex to expect concessions in your favor.
My idea of a ‘widow indeed’ is somewhat broader and more practical than Saint Paul’s. I am not objecting to his requirements--that she shall have washed the saint’s feet, if her piety takes this form, and if she can find the saint; but I do not see why she should be more diligent than any other woman in ‘following every good work,’ unless, as I suspect was the case with the widows in Timothy’s church at Macedonia, she was a charge upon the charity of that church and repaid in humble service to the brethren. The modern widow is not so reduced in circumstances, even if she is left without means. She can usually earn a living, though it may not be so good a living as her husband provided. In any case, a self-respecting ‘widow indeed’ now is one who takes a job instead of charity and performs it with valor instead of tears. The pith of honor in such a woman is not to play the feminine rôle to any man for largess or advantage in her affairs. Even on this basis she is apt to get more than is coming to her if she deals with the right man. The great majority of honest men actually shrink from the responsibility of handling widows’ funds lest some unavoidable loss occur.
On the other hand, there is an average, I should say, of at least ten mite collectors for every widow in existence. They are easily recognized, however, by the noble and vicarious disposition they show for being her financial savior or her Aladdin genius in a get-rich-quick scheme. Not long ago I had a letter from such a victim. She is a stranger to me in the flesh, but I should recognize her in paradise--an elderly widow, religious, full of kindness, always protected, whose creed is faith in the goodness, honesty, and kindness of others.
She wrote to tell me that she had just invested all she could spare in an oil well. And she asked me to pray that this money might bring her ten or even a hundred fold in return. Imagine the Lord babbling in wildcat oil speculations to answer even two widows’ prayers! Teach us some sense by not answering such prayers--which is a thing many people wiser than widows do not know about the functioning of the Almighty toward prayers. Maybe in time we shall learn that the Maker of all laws will not break one natural or moral law to save us from either death or bankruptcy. It is no use to call upon God like a fool to save you when He has endowed you with the wit to save yourself if you will only use it.
The last I heard of this widow she was the poor dear shorn lamb of those oil speculators. Where one wins her golden fleece, a thousand are clipped clean of their honest wool.
After the death of my husband I suffered for the first time in my life from the inferiority complex. I was left not merely a widow but strangely benighted, like a foreigner who is totally ignorant of the manners and customs of the people with whom he is to deal. I suppose many women have had this experience, and may think it is grief. It is terror and uncertainty. If she survives it honorably, with her head up and her banners flying, she will be obliged to shed her widow’s veil and be born again mentally no matter how soundly she may have been converted previously to the wisdom of spiritual things. She will be obliged to study something besides the Scriptures, and get stout secular doctrines for dealing with a vastly competitive and acquisitive world. Clinging to the cross is nothing to the way she must cling to her own good sense. The Lord encourages us to cling to that symbol of faith, but it is no use clinging to the world that way. She must step around in it with a firm tread and do business with her spectacles properly adjusted.
Therefore I am recording it as truth here, hardly earned, that an up-and-doing widow’s mind is one of the most remarkable mental phenomena in existence; and I defy the ablest metaphysician to analyze the thing. It is made up of feminine faculties, stiffened, sharpened, sweetened, soured and tempered to any emergency, and she has ten emergencies where a man has one, because every one with whom she deals perceives that she is a woman and proceeds upon that basis. She is much more of one than the average woman ever learns to be, but, good heavens, what a furtive, brave, serpentine, dove-good use she has got of her little old knitting-needle faculties!
I spent three years after the death of my husband walking softly beneath my widow’s veil, studying the situation which the world was to me. I worked hard, made no investments and suffered from one long nightmare of terror and grief. I know exactly how it feels to have lost my right hand for achieving life, to get up cured of the wound, but with only my left hand to support me, when I had never been obliged to support myself at all.
Widows deal with men if they earn a living, or even if they do not. The thing which alarmed me was the discovery that I knew nothing about men, and that they are mysterious. Their mental processes are different from those of women, although emotionally and every other way the family resemblance between us is so strong as to be misleading. They have a different way of planning and accomplishing their purposes. They have a conscience, probably a better and more scrupulous conscience than we have about a few things, but theirs has a wide-open loose end, through which they can pass out to achieve without a qualm some great deed that we would never pay the price in piety to accomplish.
I perceived with a sort of terror how able and uncanny they are, due chiefly to this circumstance. They have by nature more liberty of action than we can afford to exercise. This is one reason why many modern women look so queer and out of drawing. They are making the experiment. The result is a parody. No originality, they are aping men, as a feebler race imitates a stronger race. If I am any judge of the real moral greatness of women, they will suffer a revulsion of sensibility presently and take to their heels. It is safe and honorable to associate intimately with one’s husbands, sons and father, and discreetly with one’s Christian brethren in the Church, though I am wary about that; but my notion is that it is dangerous, indelicate, frequently degrading to what we are, to associate too intimately with men in their political, professional, and other manifestations.
I may be wrong about this. My opinion may spring like hypocrisy from cowardice, because I have not the courage to risk the losses these women sustain. My only excuse is that I came up in a different age and had my morals and sense of womanhood formed under different influences. If the modern woman does hold fast, and win and prove herself an asset instead of a liability in this civilization, I hope to bow my old gray head to her and take off my shoes before her in reverent recognition of the fact that she will have become the greatest pioneer of the ages, against the greatest odds, with the noblest courage.
In the meantime I am wearing my shoes, holding my neck stiff and regarding her over the top of my spectacles like a harsh, narrow-minded old mother who would like to snatch her daughters from a dangerous maelstrom and set them to the tasks at home that would make men instead of bandits of their sons, and proper maidens instead of adventurous flappers of their daughters. The best mother I ever knew never cast a ballot, but she established her sons in the way they should go. She has been dead for years, but she is still voting these men in every election.
Maybe I should have omitted these reflections. When you have survived your own world, and are now merely the spectator of another world in the making, you cannot be qualified to pass judgment upon it. I let that go with this polite apology and return to the problems which faced me so many years ago when I became a widow.