Age-old advice: The dissatisfied wife

We mine the Free Press archives for advice that still applies today (...or doesn’t)

By: Dorothy Dix Posted: 3:16 AM CST Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2016

Dorothy Dix Letter Box, originally published July 1, 1929. Dear Miss Dix – I am a travelling salesman. Have a fine position and am next in line for promotion, but my wife wants me to quit and do something else. She wants a home and a car, but I am not able to give her these things just now. I am unable to save anything because of the way she spends. We have one child, but she complains of the trouble of taking care of it. She doesn’t want to keep house, and she lives in a boarding house so she won’t have a thing to do but look sweet.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/12/2016 (3520 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Dorothy Dix Letter Box, originally published July 1, 1929.

Dear Miss Dix – I am a travelling salesman. Have a fine position and am next in line for promotion, but my wife wants me to quit and do something else. She wants a home and a car, but I am not able to give her these things just now. I am unable to save anything because of the way she spends. We have one child, but she complains of the trouble of taking care of it. She doesn’t want to keep house, and she lives in a boarding house so she won’t have a thing to do but look sweet.

When I return home over week-ends I am told of all of baby’s bad habits and what a terrible time she has had looking after him. Then she has seen dresses, shoes, hats that she wants, yet I have not spent a dime for clothes for the last year, and am beginning to look like a tramp. She doesn’t seem to understand that I can’t afford certain things, and I haven’t the nerve to tell her. What can I do?

–T.E.D.

From the July 1, 1929 newspaper: "If a man looks down at my feet when I'm settin' down, I think I'm showing too much stockin'; but if a woman does it, I know I've got a run."

Answer: Brace up and try to act like a man instead of a mouse. You are a coward, without the spunk to make your wife behave herself, and she knows it and takes advantage of it.

In her heart of hearts she has a contempt for you for it, and some of those fine days she is going to decide that you don’t make enough money to suit her and that you are not much of a man anyway, and she will leave you.

Don’t deceive yourself for a moment by thinking that you are making your wife love you by being so good to her in indulging her in the things you can’t afford, and that she thinks how sweet and self-sacrificing you are to wear patched shoes so that she can have a forty-seventh pair of embroidered sandals. She isn’t reacting that way to your unselfishness. She is thinking of what a poor sap you are to let her work you. And the first time she will ever have any real respect for you will be when you read the riot act to her and make her begin shouldering her end of the matrimonial bargain.

You can spoil a wife in. the same way that you can a child, and it works out in just the same way. Did you ever see a child that was pampered and indulged that was contented and happy? You never did. It is always peevish and fretful and restless, wanting something it can’t get. That is the way with a spoiled woman. Take away all work from a woman. Put her in a hotel or a boarding house or give her half a dozen servants so she has nothing to do but amuse herself. Give her an unlimited shopping ticket and you will make her neurotic and disgruntled and miserable.

Who are the women who are always deciding that their hard-worked husbands are not their affinities and that some other men are their soul mates? Who are the women who fill the doctors’ offices and sanitariums? Who are the women who run off after every fake religion and new cult? They are the morbid, discontented, disgruntled, idle women, whose foolish husbands thought they were being kind to them in giving them, nothing to do.

And who are the happy, healthy, contented women? Every time they are the busy, hard-working women. The women who earn their own livings. The women who cook and, sew and scrub and wash and rear half a dozen children.

The reason for it is obvious. We can’t be happy unless we have our self-respect, and no woman can respect herself when she knows that she is not doing her part in life, that she is cheating on her husband and her children. And no utterly selfish person is ever happy because his desires are insatiable. He wouldn’t have as much as he wanted if he had the whole world.

You have made a frightfully bad start with your wife, brother, but if you are ever to have any happiness you must retrace the steps you have taken. In the first place you must refuse to let your wife boss you. Don’t’ give up the good job you have because of her whim. Stick to the work you have fitted yourself to do, and stay with the firm in which you have a good chance of promotion.

Then take your wife out of that boarding house and put her to work in a home. If she had something to do to keep her busy, she wouldn’t have so much time to look around the stores and see how much finery she wanted. And then make her a definite allowance and make her life within it. Refuse to let her run in debt.

Any man who lets a wife ruin him with her extravagance is a weakling and a fool. And it gets him nowhere, even with her. Did you ever know of a woman who stuck to the man she had ruined?