No Matter How Much You Want to Help Your Family After Marriage, It Is Unfair to Make Your Husband or Wife Pay for Your Generosity
There is nothing more difficult for a man or woman to do than to draw a just line between their duty to their families, and to their husbands and wives. Take the case of a man who has been the mainstay of his own people. Perhaps his father died when he was a small boy. Perhaps the father is just one of the weak, shiftless sort who can never make a living. At any rate, the burden of the family fell on the man’s shoulders while he was still a mere lad, and he has taken care of his parents and educated his brothers and sisters.
He has looked out for all the others so long that they have ceased to notice that he does it, and have come to feel that it is his business in life to support them. They are so accustomed to dipping into his pocketbook that they have forgotten that it is not their own. And, somehow, they have established such a claim upon the man that he himself has come to feel that he is responsible for them, and must grant all their demands upon him.
Then suddenly the man meets a girl with whom he falls in love. He gets married, and then he finds that the only way he can continue to play the role of Beneficent Providence to his family is by sacrificing his wife to them.
For it is a certainty that you cannot spend the same dollar for two things.
If he supplies mother with a flivver, wife must walk If he keeps the boys in college, wife must live in a cheap, rented house, instead of buying the pretty bungalow upon which her heart is set. If he continues the girls’ allowances so that they will not have to go to work, the wife must do all her cooking and washing and ironing and baby tending to pay the bills.
What shall the man do in such circumstances? Go on giving his money to his family and force his wife to do without the things that she might have? Deny his children the advantages he might give them if his income went only to the upkeep if his own home? Or shall he realize that his own household has the first claim upon him, and withdraw his support from his parasitic family and leave it to shift for itself?
With a woman the question is even more difficult of decision, because family affection is generally stronger in a woman than it is in a man, and because family needs tug more at woman’s heartstrings than they do at a man’s.
Yet the money that she gives to her family is money that her husband earns by toil and sweat, and she robs him when she helps them.
Take the case of a woman who is married to a man who loves her, who is generous to her, and who cannot endure to see her troubled and worried about anything he can help. The husband is hard-working and thrifty, one of the men who would pile up a tidy little fortune that would make him comfortable and carefree in his old age if he could invest his savings.
But there are no savings because his wife spends it all on her family.
Father is always in debt and borrowing money that he never pays back. Mother is forever having to have a new winter suit or a new set of teeth. A wild young brother gets into trouble and has to paid out. Sally has to have a commercial course to enable her to make a living. There’s an operation for this one. A trousseau for another. Baby clothes. A thousand things that call for money.
Many a man spends the balance of his life after he marries toiling to support his wife’s family, just as many a woman is sold into slavery to her husband’s people on her wedding day. And it isn’t fair. It isn’t right. It isn’t giving the poor victim a square deal.
It is beside the question for a man to say, “How can I support my wife in luxury when my family needs so many things? When Johnny needs to have his teeth straightened, and Susie’s voice needs training, and Tom is worried to death over business and needs some help so badly?”
Or for a woman to say “How can I live in plenty and see my family want? How can I buy a new dress for myself, when, if Lilly had some pretty clothes, she could make a good match? How can I put money in the savings bank when Tom needs to have his tonsils taken out, and a summer at the seashore would restore Jenny to health?
It is also beside the question that a man and woman are willing to sacrifice themselves on the family altar. They have no right to offer up also their husbands and wives who have no desire whatever to be sacrificial goats for their in-laws, and who bleat most earnestly against it.
When people marry, they take upon themselves new responsibilities that take precedence over the old ones. They assume duties that are paramount to every other duty in the world, and their first obligation is to this new allegiance. A man’s wife and children should come before all else to him. He should look out for their welfare first, just as a woman’s duty to her husband and her new home comes before all else.
And no man has a right to deny his wife the things that are rightfully hers for the sake of giving to his family, just as no woman has aright to keep her husband poor by making his support her family.
The very ting that it may be generous or unselfish for a man and woman to do before marriage often becomes after a marriage a cruel and bitter injustice to those who have a paramount claim upon them.
--Dorothy Dix
From page 5 of the Durham Morning Herald, Wednesday, Dec. 31, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84020730/1924-12-31/ed-1/seq-5/#words=DECEMBER+31%2C+1924
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