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Beveridge, Albert Jeremiah, 1862-1927

"The Young Man and the World"


Bismarck's boundless love for his princess increased with the years;
yet she was chiefly, and perhaps only, a German "hausfrau"--an ideal
housewife. The German people particularly loved the wife of Bismarck
because of these exclusively domestic traits. Perhaps that was why he
adored her more and more as the years went by. Gladstone, who was a
very surly and irritable person, declared that his wife had made his
life "cushiony."
Of course it is taken for granted in this paper that the young
American wife is this kind of a woman--wise and gentle and
good-natured--above all things good-natured. For says the Bible, "It
is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and an
angry woman." But read what is written in the Book of the right kind
of a woman--one "in whose tongue is the law of kindness," as the
Scriptures' exquisite phraseology has it.
I don't like the tone of the common comment of the American medical
profession about the neurotic condition of our American women. Our
physicians are saying that there is not one American woman in a
hundred who is nervously normal. The profession declares that they are
excitable, irritable, peevish, and that this unfortunate state is
produced by the unnatural and absurd tension they are under all the
time.


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