Health Insures Happiness.—Be Ambitious for Health.—The Scarcity of Perfectly Healthy Women.—Fashion to the Rescue.—The Boon of Health.—Necessity of Ventilation and Fresh Air.—Duties to the Home.—The Greatness of Woman’s Sphere.—In the Society Drift.—The Extreme of Wholly Avoiding Society.—Keeping in the Middle of the Road.—Pleasures and Recreations Taken Together.—Taking Time to Keep Young.—Mistakes Which Some Husbands Make.—Wrecks at the Beginning of Married Life.

To be a successful home-maker, the young wife must be well and know how to conserve her health. While the husband may be patience itself yet an invalid in the home, and that invalid the home-maker, is a serious drawback to happiness.

Sir James Paget, in a lecture on national health, says, “We want more ambition for health. I should like to see a personal ambition for health as keen as that for bravery, for beauty, or for success in our athletic games or field sports. I wish there were[48] such an ambition for the most perfect national health, as there is for national renown in war, in art, or in commerce.”

“All women ought to know that invalidism, speaking generally—there are, of course, exceptions to this rule,—is a carefully cultivated condition, quite as truly as the magnificent condition of the prize-fighter, the race-horse or the gymnast.”

It has become a rare thing, to-day, to find a woman who counts herself perfectly healthy. Is it possible that womankind has become so susceptible to influence, that she imagines herself ill when she is not? We are more or less creatures of imitation, and yield to the force of our surroundings without a murmur. More than this, we must admit that among the many a semi-invalidism is considered genteel and attractive. True, in the last few years we have made some effort to rise above this, and a few have succeeded.

Even Dame Fashion herself has started a line of reforms that we trust will continue popular, until they have become fixtures. Short skirts, heavy shoes, natural waists are sought by a fairly large number to-day; but we dare not prophesy what would be the result did another turn of the wheel of fashion decree otherwise. The agitation must be increased until no backward step is possible along these lines, and until our daughters will desire comfort and healthfulness in dress, rather than fashion, and its frequent result, disease.

It is not enough that you as a wife, come to your marriage with good health, but that you do all in your power to conserve it in the days and months thereafter. It is safe to say, if from principle and wise judgment you learn in the new relations during the first year, how best to preserve and conserve your strength, you will carry this knowledge and practice with you through life.

First you must consider health a priceless boon, before you lose it.

In the new relations fix your habits of exercise and recreation carefully, and adhere to them. Learn how to rest, before you have reached the point nervously where rest is impossible. Do not presume too much upon your splendid health, and overdo daily. Stop before you have reached the limit of your strength.

If you have not learned about the necessity of good ventilation in the home, learn it at once, and let in daily the fresh, pure, life-giving sunshine and fresh air, room-fulls of it.[50] Do not be afraid of adding to the fuel bill, for warm air charged with poison will heat less easily than pure, cold air which invites the warmth. Have plenty of fresh air in your sleeping rooms, for it is quite necessary to your rising clear-brained and sweet-tempered; and never forget that you will be largely responsible for the mental and moral atmosphere of the home.

Be careful and guarded as to your society demands, lest they steal your time and strength, and you be unfitted for the real duties of your home. Home must hereafter always be to you first and foremost in your heart and duty, if you fill your position truly.

Be not misled by the false philosophy of the day, that tends in many instances to underrate the home and its high blessedness in the life of woman.

An Eastern proverb tells us that, “The house rests upon the mother.” Just as soon as you take upon yourself the vows that make you wife, you become the mother of a home. Whether children ever come to bless it or not, you are its mother. Yet few women appreciate the importance or power of this position. With the grain of truth there is in it, there is a great deal of wasteful talk about woman, and her narrow sphere. Even[51] though she be tied to the home and the little ones, yet her sphere is just as wide as she has a mind to make it. Four walls cannot shut in a large-hearted, loving woman. From the home blessed by her presence goes out a stream of mighty influence.

Put into a woman’s sphere all the depth and sweetness, and wisdom, and comfort, that the words, love, home, mother and children comprehend, and dare to call her sphere narrow if you will! To me it is so wide that I have seen few women who make themselves large enough to fill it, and these few are not found among those who talk of its narrowness and drudgery. The light of the home, the beacon for the husband, the teacher and guide for little feet, the sharer in all the secrets and joys, the consoler in all sorrows—how do the little annoyances and patience-trying cares dwindle into insignificance, when compared with these. What in public life can win her from a life like this, if she have it to do?

Thoughtlessly many young wives get into the society drift before they know it, and their best strength is wasted, and they are laying the foundations for a young old age. Nervously overwrought, hysteria comes in with its train of multitudinous ills, and destroys[52] both her comfort and that of the home.

On the other hand do not go to the opposite extreme, which many young people in the first days of their married happiness selfishly fall into, namely, avoiding society altogether. Once out of the pleasant, social round of friends it is hard to regain your lost footing, and you fret under it that your old friends are so cold and indifferent.

“Keep to the middle of the road,” in these things, and you will hold your youth and friends, and make a home that it is good to go into. As far as possible take your pleasures and recreations together. Plan for each other in this, and see how it keeps the sweetness in life.

A fresh, bright, young looking neighbor called on me a few days ago, and when, during our conversation, she spoke of her age as forty-two, I was amazed, and said: “I should never have thought you were more than thirty-five.”

“I have kept young,” she replied, “and I know how. If there has ever been pleasure taken in our family, it is always planned for when I can enjoy it. In the evening when the cares of the day are over, or when I can get away from the cares at other times.”[53] She has five splendid children, and the promise of a sixth. She does the larger part of her home work, and yet takes time to keep young.

It rests with you largely, young wives, during the first years of your lives together to fix the habits of our home in the duties of rest and recreation. Have firm principles about these matters and insist lovingly upon them.

And now a word upon a more delicate question, but one which has much to do with settling and perfecting all the others, or spoiling your happiness almost irremediably. Many a marriage which otherwise would have been happy, is wrecked in the first days of the honeymoon.

Frightened and timid, and filled with a vague unrest at the mysteries of marriage which await their revelation, you place your destiny in the keeping of your husband, for wedded happiness or wedded woe. Whispers and covert suggestions of the unwise ones about you, as they allude to the life you are coming to, have given you this unrest, and it remains for the husband, by his loving considerateness to win you away from fearfulness to a sure confidence in himself.

Many otherwise kind men have become possessed with the thought that every right is[54] theirs immediately; and in their inconsiderate, rapacious passion, in the speedy consummation of marriage, at whatever cost of pain or wounded feeling on the part of her whom they have taken to love and honor, they well nigh wreck the after happiness of both in the first days of their united lives.

Husband beware of the wrong of committing a veritable outrage upon the person of her whom God has given you as your companion, and suffering ever after the stings of remorse, that she never again can feel the same respect and love for you that she could, had you been more considerate of her feelings and desires.

It will be difficult for her to be persuaded that the animal nature does not control and dominate your love for her, rather than the higher instincts of the soul.

It would be far better for every prospective bride if she suspects that the man who is to be her husband has not been informed in these things in a wholesome way, either herself, or through the intervention of a friend to put into his hands books that will teach him wisely and well these things upon which so much of his happiness depends.

I wish it were binding upon every young man before he stands at the marriage altar, to read carefully and painstakingly Dr. Stall’s books for young men and young husbands. With the earnest words and teachings of these books ringing in their hearts they could hardly live careless lives, or make the mistakes which, in ignorance of the great truths he inculcates, they might otherwise do.