Successful Marriages

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 81, 6 April 1938, Page 14

Successful Marriages

CODE TOR WIVES. “Don’ts” for women who want to make a success of marriage were enumerated in a lecture this week by Dr. Ethel Dukes, herself a w r ifc and mother as well as co-director of the Institute of Child Psychology, says an overseas correspondent.

The successful wife, she said, does not:—Domineer over her husband; criticise him in the presence of others; insist on changing him; refuse to be friends with his friends; try to show him off; make him into a cushion carrier or an additional servant.

Also she does not:—lnsist on constant entertaining in the house and out of it when he is tired and wants a smoke and his cosy slippers. Despise his homespun qualities when she has had time to improve her cultural and social qualities while he has been hard at work. Run down his mother or other relatives. Get into debt. Refuse to have children if he wants them and there is no medical reason why she should not. Use any feminine wiles or neurotic illnesses to make him subservient to her.

To these twelve golden rules, Dr. Dukes added that an arrangement should be made at the very beginning about money. Every wife should have a personal allowance to spend as she wished without question from her husband. Other qualities essential to the

i successful wife were commonsense, a sense of proportion and a sense of ! humour as well as unselfishness, tactJ fulness, adaptability, absolute fidelity ' and loyalty to her husband. “I am all in favour of early marriages," added Dr. Dukes, “but, par- • ticularly in the early days of marriage, I courage is necessary for the successful f wife. It is most important that girls should be trained to be good wives, not f only in matters of housekeeping, but (in other ways. In earlier generations girls married knowing nothing of sex matters. Their mothers, although they had had many children, often told them nothing. ’ } Her final advice was that the successful wife needed the quality of forgiveness. In marriage men were often far more forgiving than women.