Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/July 28, 1909

A THRIVING Western man, who lives in a thriving Western town, says he is going to get rid of his little Western wife because she is too clubbable.

“When I go home at night,” says the thriving Western man, in the papers which he has prepared in his divorce suit, “I never know who is going to meet me: the cook, the housemaid or my wife.

“Generally it is not my wife. She’s always at the club, “reading papers on Browning or Tolstoi.

“I’m sick of it. I want a home, so I have told her she can go and live with her club if she wants to, and I’ll hunt for some woman who will think more of me than she does of Dante or Ibsen.”

Why, the idea! Did you ever hear of such a thing, girls? Who could think more of a man like that than she could of Dante or Ibsen? I suppose we women ought all to be very indignant at the story of this thriving Western man, especially we women who believe in the “Broader Selfhood” and the “Higher Life,” but I am afraid I have a good deal of sympathy for it.

He’s all wrong about the club, though. It isn’t the club that’s to blame, or Dante or Ibsen, either. It’s the woman. If she wasn’t reading Dante, she’d be reading “The Duchess,” or embroidering doilies, or doing anything else that happened to please her, without any regard to what she ought to be doing at all.

Seven out of ten married women in America pay just about as much attention to what their husbands want as they do to the mewing of a stray cat under the window.

So long as they themselves are housed and fed and dressed—that’s the most important part, the dress—they don’t seem to care what becomes of poor, patient pa, who works all day at things he hates, just to give them the things they like.

Every married man has a right to a home and a home that is a home when he provides the money to sustain it.

When his wife refuses to make a home for him, I don’t blame him for leaving her with plenty of time for her own particular fads.

A woman can leave a man for failure to provide. Why isn’t it just as bad a crime for a woman to fall to make use of what the man does provide, because she is too selfish to bother her head about the kind of home he wants?

Greetings to you, brother of the West; heartfelt, hearty greetings. I sympathize with you.