GILBERT FRANKAU'S VIEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 128, 1 June 1935, Page 18

GILBERT FRANKAU'S VIEWS

ADVICE ON MATRIMONY

IF HE HAD A SON

One of the best wives and mothers I know took honours at a famous university and still teaches there, says Gillfcrt Frankau in an article in the "Daily Mail" entitled "Why Men Don't Marry University Girls." Nevertheless, if I were lucky enough to have a son, and he were one. of those very rare sons who would take his father's advice about matrimony, I should most certainly counsel him against choosing a hyper-educated wife. For the last characteristic in a woman which appeals to my own temperament—and my son, presumably, would inherit that temperament—is the academic mind. And it is just that type of mind which the so-called higher education of woman sets out to produce. THE PRECONCEIVED IDEA. Now the academic type of mind, in a young man, has definite value. It gives him balance. It teaches him to discriminate. But the young man, his university training over, is still adaptable enough to learn that average humanity does not rule its life academically, being at least as much swayed by its heart, as by its brain. Whereas the young girl, her mind once mouldod into professorial shape, finds it almost impossible" to accept any further lessons. Because the female of our species reaches her full mental development much more quickly than the male; and is therefore less flexible than the male, more conservative than the male, and infinitely more prone to refuse the teaching of any experience which conflicts with a- preconceived idea. ■ ■' , ■ And because the whole .theory of learning as now .applied to women is the theory of the preconceived idea — in other , words, book-learning—the effect of it on the average young woman, who matures so,much more quickly than the average young man, is apt tor be a complete" ossification of the common sense. ; • . AN OBSESSION. An educated boy, as the years go by him, relies less and less oh his booklearning, more and more on his common sense. Buf the hyper-educated girl clings more and more to. the writtan word, to statistics and formulae. If life does not respond to some written formula, it is not the formula—thinks the "girl—but life itself which has made the mistake. It is for this reason, I fancy, that the average woman doctor, the average woman barrister, the average woman architect, and indeed all average professional women (though, here again, there are the brilliant exceptions) are such comparative failures. Obsessed with the preconceived idea, they are afraid to trust their common sense and that even more valuable female characteristic," their intuition, in a crisis. ; How much more, then, will that inflexible type of womanhood be apt to prove a failure when confronted with the ordinary everyday problems of the ordinary everyday wife? CONSIDER YOUR OWN WIFE. Will the average reader who happens to be happily married—let us say 90 per cent, of the married men who' read this article—please consider his own wife. . How has she contrived to keep him happy; how has she managed—the tverage man being what he~is—to make him "cleave to her ouly!*?. ' ; :... By means of book-learning, formulae, and statistics? Not'much! The average wife keeps her husband happy, and thereby retains possession of him, primarily by adaptability, by making her own behavioui tonform to his standards. Even while she is still only engaged, and certainly before the honeymoon is over, the average young woman's common sense, the average young woman's intuition, will unite to tell her, "You didn't expect this. You didn't expect that. Here's a jolt. There's a jolt. So hadn't you better let down your intellectual shock-absorbers?" ; But the hyper-trained, mentally inflexible university girl finds it almost impossible to do that: For the female academic mind is a very stubborn mind. It hates to make allowances. Moreover, it is being trained, and this increasingly, to reject romance. Whereas the average male mind hankers constantly after romance, demanding it even in marriage. THE ROMANCE QUESTION. And after all, why not? Marriage is not a question of booklearning; of formulae; of parrot-know-ledge and statistics. It is the question —and therefore the most romantic of all questions—whether two human creatures of almost completely disparate characteristics, the male creature and the female creature, can live their whole lives in mutual amity; thus ensuring the continuity of the human race. Happy marriages produce the best children. But the law of happiness, whether in life generally or marriage specifically, is the supreme law of give-and-take. The so-called higher education of women seems to me to omit the first principle of all education—the teaching of the adolescent to think for themselves. Our University girls are not think-, ing for themselves. They are not even thinking for themselves as women. Those in authority over th&m have taken the modicum of learning which male experience has found necessary as a preparation for life—and decreed it the be-all and end-all of life. "Now that you've learnt everything," they say in effect, "don't trouble to learn any more." THE POOR HUSBANDS. Hence the stultified intuition. Hence the ossification of common sense. Hence the Shakespeare-crazy bride who despises her young husband because he likes detective stories and feeds him on vegetarian vitamines when he is yearning for a steak-and-kidney pudding. Hence the young mother wno rushes to the psycho-analyst when the rhubarb pills should.be taken from the cupboard or the cane from behind the' door. From all of which, and much more, may the good fairies of woman's common sense and woman's intuition deliver her. As, eventually, they will. For remember—it is less than eighty years since the law consented to regard a wife as anything more than a husband's chattel. It is only fifty-three years since that same law finally allowed a wife to have separate money.