f growing broader and keener as the years pass, she has
become narrow. It never occurs to him that the fault may be wholly his
own. In the early years of their married life he perhaps laughed at her
"dreams," as he called her longings for self-improvement. He
discouraged, if he did not actually oppose, every effort she made to grow
to the full stature of her womanhood. His indifference or hostility
quenched the hopes she had indulged before marriage. The bitterness of
her disappointment crushed her spirit. She lost her buoyancy and
enthusiasm and gradually sank to the level of a household drudge. And
the husband wonders what has changed the joyous, high-spirited girl he
married into the dull, apathetic woman who now performs her duties like
an automaton.

There are to-day thousands of wives doing the work of ordinary
housemaids, who, putting it on a low standard, are smothering ability to
earn perhaps more money than the men who enslave them, if they only had
an opportunity to unfold the powers which God has given them; but they
have been brought up from infancy to believe that marriage is the only
real career for a woman, that these longings and hungerings for
self-expression are to be smothered, covered up by the larger duties of a
wife and mother.

If the husbands could change places with their wives for a year, they
would feel the contracting, narrowing influence in which the average wife
lives. Their minds would soon cease to reach out, they would quickly
feel the pinching, paralyzing effect of the monotonous existence, of
doing the same things every day, year in and year out. The wives, on the
other hand, would soon begin to broaden out. Their lives would become
richer, fuller, more complete, from contact with the world, from the
constant stretching of their minds over large problems.

I have heard men say that remaining in the home on Sundays or holidays
just about uses them up; that it is infinitely harder and more trying
than the same time spent in their occupations, and that while they love
their children their incessant demands, the noise and confusion would
drive them to drink if they had to bear it all the time. Strong men
admit that they can not stand these little nerve-racking vexations of the
home. Yet they wonder why the wife and mother is nervous, and seem to
think that she can bear this sort of thing three hundred and sixty-five
days in the year without going away and getting relief for