Dear Dorothy Dix—
I am 25 years old and have been married and divorced twice, but have no children. I am now going with a man who is a perfect gentleman, but my father objects to my going with him or any one else, just the way he always did before I married either time. I am never allowed to receive any company in my home or to have any men callers. The result was that I used to meet them on the sly on the streets. That is the way I met and married the wrong men.
Now I want to play fair and square by having my friend visit me in my own home. I do not intend having him stay until midnight. All I ask is that he be permitted to call for me when we attend a theatre or dance, but this is out of the question, as my father will not allow it.
What should I do? Sneak out again the way I used to and meet my friend on the sly, or find some other place to board, where I can have him call on me the way he should?
Answer:
Certainly, Julia, I should advise you go live some place where you can receive your men friends in a proper and decent manner, and where you will not be forced to lie and deceive in order to have a little innocent pleasure. You owe that much to yourself because no man can have the same respect for a girl who has to slip out and meet him on the sly on a street corner as he does for the one who receives him in the conventional-hallowed precincts of her own parlor.
But surely any father who refuses to let his daughters receive their men friends at home is a fit subject for the investigation of either an alienist or the Grand Jury. He must be mad, not to know what he is doing; or criminal, not to realize the results of forcing a young girl out on the streets to pick up her acquaintances there, to find her pleasures in the street and to be treated as lightly as men treat girls they come to know in that sort of way.
For when you lock a girl in a room, it is a dead sure thing that she will climb out of the window. If you refuse to let her have company at home, she will find it wherever she can, on the streets, at corner drug stores, at dance halls, at many a place that is the anteroom of hell. If you deny her a lawful good time in her youth, she will have an unlawful good time, even if she has to sell her soul to get it—which is something for stern parents to think over.
The only way fathers and mothers can protect their daughters is to encourage them to bring their friends home, to make their companions welcome in their home and make home so attractive that the young people want to come to it. In that way only do they have a chance to find out with whom their children are associating and to guide them in the choice of friends. In that they only can they help their girls to pick the right men for husbands.
More than that, the background of a home is a great protection to a girl. It throws an aura of respectability about her, and the knowledge that she is being gently, wisely, capably looked after makes men show her a deference and a consideration they never show to a girl they pick up on the streets, who has no home to which they are ever invited and no mother and father they ever met.
Your father is responsible for your two unfortunate marriages, Julia. You have suffered and profited by your hard lesson. Meet no more men on the sly, but openly and aboveboard in some respectable home.
-=-
Dear Miss Dix—
I am a young married man and earn a good salary, enough for us to live on in comfort, but my wife is not willing for us to have a home of our own. She wants to live with her people, which I cannot do. In the three years we have been married we have started to keep house six times, and every time she has broken up and gone back to her father and mother. The last time she went I refused to go with her, but she took our baby, which I am crazy about, and went anyway. I feel that I have done my duty, because di did all that I could to make her happy and comfortable, and to make a nice home in which our child could group up, and now I am at my wits’ end to know what step to take next.
G.W.
Answer:
When a woman is a quitter there isn’t much chance to do anything with her, G.W. Your only hope would be in her parents having the backbone and the good sense to tell their daughter that she must go back home and do her duty, and that they will not make any slacker welcome in their house. But they will never do it, because if they had been people of the grit they would never have raised up the poor, weak, flabby creature your wife is.
It is very sad to think of how many divorces could be avoided, how many homes could be saved, if mothers and fathers had the nerve and determination to hold their daughters to their duty after they get married, and force them to go back and try to make a success of marriage, instead of chucking it the first time anting goes wrong and they find out that matrimony means work and sacrifice, instead of billing and cooing.
There are times when we all feel like giving up and running up the white flag of defeat; when we feel that we have done all that we can do, and there is no more fight left in us. But if somebody or some force holds us to our task we get our second wind and wrest victory out of defeat, and we get a happiness and a self-respect that we would never have known if we had cowardly surrendered. And this is just as true of matrimony as it is of any other undertaking.
The woman who refuses to do her part in making a home when her husband provides the means of doing so defaults on her part of the marriage contract. She is a coward. She is a cheat, and her husband loses nothing when she leaves him. But when she takes the child he loves away from him she adds a cruel crime to her weakness. She has no right to rob the child of its father nor to do the child the deadly wrong of making it an orphan deprived of a father’s guidance.
But what a man can do in such a situation I so not know. It is just one of the pitiful tragedies of which we find no solution hat happens so often in this heart-break house we call life.
Dorothy Dix
-=-
Dear Miss Dix—
My parents are trying to force me to marry one man while I love another. What shall I do?
Florence
Answer:
Marry the man you want. You are the one who has to live with the man, not your parents, so you are the one who should be pleased. The marriers should be the pickers and have their own choice.
Dorothy Dix
From page 3 of the Durham Morning Herald, Saturday, Sept. 13, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84020730/1924-09-13/ed-1/seq-3/#words=SEPTEMBER+13%2C+1924
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