OUR HUSBANDS

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 155, 23 February 1932, Page 2

OUR HUSBANDS

THANKSGIVING DAY NATION AL SINGING OF PRAISE OF THE AMERICAN spouse. ' PRIDE THAT ENGLISH LACK. It was a pretty notion of the Americans in London to keep their national Thanksgiving Day by singing the praises of the American husband. This sort of proper pride we nationally lack. An English party celebrating St. George's Day by oratory on the Englishmen as a husband is not easy to imagine, writes H. C. Bailey in the London Daily Telegraph. I am not sure, that anybody has drawn up a clear specification of what the peculiarly English husband is. The day after this thanksgiving for the matrimonial virtues of the American man, . an. American lady explained that she was marrying an Englishman 'because she "wanted to be bossed." -American women may thus expect every man of us to do his duty, but, .as Mr. Pecksniff said of the expeetations of England in that matter, if she does, she is very sanguine and will be much disappointed.

The conventional opinion on this matter makes the Englishman more authoritative in his matrimonial affairs than the American, but also ascribes a great deal more domination to the Continental husband. I do not say this is true. In spite of the tepid enthusiasm for the rights of women iii France, the French woman is not apt to find much difficulty in getting control of the family. ; • Show of Power. No doubt she is in general content to enjoy the substance without the show of power. To be quite sure of what the national practice in matrimony really is, as distinct from what it seems, is so difficult that you may doubt whether differences in husbands are a matter of nationality at all. The conduct expected of the husband in America was most clearly defined by the lady who said that an American man goes back to his house and wife, and goes home to the offiee. This is what ten thousand American novels have already told us. But the man who is more interested in his work than his wife is not one of the animals found only on the American Contini ent.

There seems, however, to be a further claim that in America this male lack of interest in conjugal affairs has had more elaborate effects on the female than elsewhere. The American woman, we are told, has come to look upon marriage as .progress, feeling that each successive husband should be better than the last, and giving her children a new father every seven years or so. But when I read that we have never thought of anything of the sort in this country, I have to remark that it was not merely thought of, but put into by George Meredith a quarter of a century since. He proposed that all marriages should be limited to a term of ten -years or so,' renewable at the end of that period only on the desire of both parties. What exactly would happen to any incidental children was not provided, but in a general way the State was to protect them. "There would be a d of an uproar before such a change can be made," said Meredith. "It will be a great shock, but look back and see ■ what shocks there have been, and what changes have nevertheless taken place on this marriage business in the past." The changes and shocks are surely much less impressive than the persistence of the business down the centuries on the same old .principles.