Hard Labour for Life

In 'A Book for Brides’ Marghanita Laski has written a chapter called ‘Hard Labour for Life.’ If I had read it when I was twenty I think it would have put me off marriage completely. I discovered by experience that her views on marriage in 1948 continued to be valid although the book was published 18 years before I got married. Things might have been expected to have changed a little in the swinging 60’s but they didn’t.

Her opening sentence is: “The most important fact about marriage to my way of thinking is that from first to last it is unremitting hard work” and she goes on to itemise the ways in which this need for hard work manifests.

“One of the things your husband undoubtedly envisages getting out of marriage is ‘a nice home.’ It’s YOUR job, not his, to make it so. It won’t matter in the least if you as well as he leave the house at eight thirty each morning and don’t return till half past six. It’s still your job to order the groceries, queue for the fish, organise the dinner party, count the laundry, and darn the socks. If he helps you with the washing up it’s a grace and you’ve got to say ‘thank you.’”

I certainly felt that home making was my responsibility and I didn’t just ‘count’ the laundry either, I washed it by hand and ironed it. I watched my friends assuming the same burdens and I own to being slightly appalled when my daughters don’t do it all now.

Marghanita moves remorselessly on to deal with even more unpalatable facts. Firstly, she points out that soon after the wedding at least one of the couple will stop trying to please or be attractive to the other. ‘However gay and gallant a man may be before marriage he’s awfully apt to slip gratefully into more or less dependable dullness afterwards - at least as far as his wife is concerned.” (How true.) Is it possible to tell ones husband outright that he is getting dull? Marghanita wisely says not. “It cannot be sufficiently stressed that you never do any good with a man by ticking him off. It is equally and uncontrovertibly true that the judicious use of flattery has the most amazingly constructive results.”

Massage and manipulation are necessary for a happy marriage.

She goes on to warn that it is best to keep ones own troubles and feelings under wraps. No good will come of weeping, shouting, nagging, swearing or throwing things. (Well, she’s right abut all that. I know. I tried.)

Next she pours cold water on the romantic notion that a couple will confide absolutely in each other after marriage. “.... telling each other everything is a rather silly pipe-dream: it is difficult enough for a trained psychiatrist to know what really goes on inside you ... No adult relationship can possible exist on any other basis than a reasonable amount of reticence on both sides.”

She advises confiding in a female friend.

The social chores, like entertaining your husband’s friends (for which occasion he might buy the cigarettes but that is all you can decently expect of him,) having visiting cards engraved, keeping the Christmas card list, sending letters of thanks, congratulations and condolence (not just cards - whole letters) this will all devolve upon the wife. I do think most of that has fallen by the wayside now (though if it hadn’t I might get a birthday card from my son on time and not after his sisters have reminded him!)

The aforementioned trials pale in the face of the final problem the brave Marghanita faces square on: the Predatory Blonde.

“Dealing with casual and predator blondes is about the hardest job any wife can face up to. Upbraiding and reproaches hardly ever work, and even if they do it’s seldom much fun afterwards. Ditto tears.’ She derides the advice to be found in magazine for the emergency facial, new hairdo, or new hat, because the blonde can offer what the wife can’t ‘...a good time free from all taint of responsibility ‘

She doesn’t recommend getting angry and mentioning divorce at this difficult time - it might be taken up. “Undoubtedly the best way to deal with the predatory blonde is to keep silent and hope for the best - and is there any job in the world harder than THAT?”

After all this depressing realism she spends a paragraph making amends by telling of the reward of companionship, love and motherhood “...together with the real sense of achievement in fine craftsmanship that only comes from working hard and well.“

Which leaves me with a bit of a lump in my throat!