THESE HUSBANDS!

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20520, 22 March 1930, Page 1 (Supplement)

THESE HUSBANDS!

THEIR WICKED WAYS.

Br MATANGA,

I Oh, Ihese husbands! It appears that they have for untold ages—though untold no longer—robbed their wives of what these wives most prized, the power of the purse. Fie, lie! They should be taught how wrong this is, and that they have too long meddled with what they really know nothing about and are by ineradicable defects of nature incompetent to handle. What ignorance is theirs! l)o they not know it was ordained that Mother Eve should drive the first bargain, and that if Father Adam hadn't been an interfering muddler we should all be yet in Eden—on an 'extended model of garden planning? He should have stuck to his gardening, and the washing of the clothes, and the tending of the animals, and then things would have been all right. As soon as he put his finger in the financial fig-pie the trouble happened. It is high time every living Adam was put in his proper place. Ino, it's no use his saying that he earns the family money. It is a well-established economic fact—is it not ?—that the department of a present-day business that shows the biggest profit on working costs is the accountancy office, where the orders are checked and the bills are paid. On the profound truth of this is based the spreading determination to close up all other departments and retain the office alone. The analogy is as nearly perfect as are most analogies: it is in the kitchen, where the orders are checked, and at the little wife's escritoire—no, the wife's little escritoire; pardon, —where she loves to ply her pen, that the money is made. A shilling saved is a shilling earned, you know, and a' that. These husbands profess to go out to work. Their' pretence is now to be exposed to the universal derision of womankind. Work ? No, no. Is it not a scandalous fact that these husbands, away from home duties all day on this pretext, have been.' quite otherwise* engaged? Ostensibly at pick-and-shovel jobs, they have played twoup until the ganger's next visit to them with a refresher course in a jug, and at last, when "knocking oil " approached, have smeared their hands and faces with a little grime, supplied by the contractor or. local body for the purpose, and shaken a few spadefuls of earth over each others clothes, that they might go home with honourable scars ? In the factories, they have held poker parties, varied with stop-work meetings, except for siestas induced by the lulling drone of the machines —automatic machines, of course, .for no man there has energy enough to do more than turn on a switch and leave them to tend themselves. The office? Ah, that excuse for coming home too late to bath the babv, or going back to overtake arreats of dutv, is no longer of any worth: bridge and" teas and putting practice and exchange of funny stories fill up the gay hours, as every wife with a nose on her face has discovered. Let these husbands henceforth keep silence about work. it is done in onlv one place in the wor.d, the place from which they run away every morning of the week except Sunday. So that's that! Monopolising 'a Pleasure. Earning the money, then, the wives have full right to dominate its spending. Q.E.D. They will see to the Q.E.F. The husbands.are bound to complain. lon see. they like so much this spending ot money over counters. Where is theie.a husband whose soul does not thrill with delight unspeakable when be walks into a shop and talks with a lordly air, "Show me what you have in bloaters. . . • I Thanks- could vou cut me off a sample ol this' one—a * tail, .say-to take home to show my wife? . . . Anything new in pickles? . . • No, that is too mild. Sandsoap ? Not the old brand with the magenta label ? This yellow is too strident. I'll wait till you get the other in." And so, through the piece, day bv da v. 'Every husband is simply frothing to buy the clothes for all the family, from the maiden aunt, who is a permanent lodger, to the youngest scapegrace in rompers;'and he finds.his real life when, after he has come home from play, he can go through illustrated catalogues with numbered designs and make next season s selections. In those great moments a little longer, perhaps, than ordinary moments—he is a man indeed; and, if his wife be but sharp enough, she will catch him posing before a full-length mirror, practising the appropriate tilt of chin and gesture of hand for " A quarter of a yard of this, if you please, and be sure to send it this afternoon." Oh, the deep satisfaction of the experience! For this sort of thing he has too long lived. But it is not fair that he should monopolise the, joy. See how the life of every woman has been cramped by denial of her right' to do all the buying and pay all the bills. Achieving a Fell Purpose.

How she lost it she is not quite certain. It may have been at the time of the meeting of the early and latter rains, when the stocks in all the shops were a little damaged by water, and, disliking the slippery mud abott Ararat, she gave way in a" weak moment to a suggestion of her husband s that he could do as well at the consequent salvage sales. From that, moment, possibly, 0 having tasted the sweets of frenzied shopping, the husbands conspired to snatch all merehanting pleasures for themselves. Ur it may have been at the' Tower of Babel—no women, of course, being there present—that these husbands put their heads together to achieve their fell purpose. These things are speculative, like so much of the buying they have bungled for countless aeons. Bui the right tiling will be done. Rising in their wrath, the women have said so, and they must have tlie last word. The? look for victory with as keen and certain a hope as has the Mau. Yet let them not be so confident as to neglect means of succeeding. These husbands have bad so long an innings that they do not like the idea of being bowled out; and they arc wily, terribly wily. There is not one" of them but lies awake all night and everv night scheming to outwit what a strictlv secret meeting of them lately described in a resolution as " this Amazon advance." Law, not Love. So ladies, as the iiery cross passes, speak whispers of vigilance somewhere near the place where an ear ought to be for to-day a peculiarity of hairdiessing is apt to hide the exact location of the organ. " A legal contract " is the slogan. Sa'v it to yourself, twenty-five times ere vou rise in the morning, fifty times in Vour bath, a hundred times at every meeting, but not once to these husbands. Get the law altered, and then go to law, to law with a vengeance, as the only sure foundation for a respectable and enlightened home. Have the power of the purse given back to you, after its long loss, and hold on to it with tooth and nail. Never again, if you be valiant, tan the world relapse into masculine barbarity. Vou are winning. The si # gn is sure. What is it' The men have been reduced to the extremity of using the argument that marriage ought to be based on love, and that a common purse would be a fine sphere for co-operation. Love. What's that? All fudge. You vo dropped the word from your vocabulary now, foi it might get in the way of law. And as for a common purse, did ever anybody hear anything good about " mutual aid or the value of having all things common Don't listen for a moment to the artful selfishness of these husbands, but get a lawyer. "No home should be without one."-