or increased responsibility. The husband who takes none of
his problems home is frequently a mystery to his wife, but he probably
feels that she is not sufficiently informed to be useful in helping him
make decisions on purely business issues. Wives sometimes rebel against
this, because they do not make the essential distinction between respect
for them as individuals and respect for their information about a
specific business question.

The soundness of the belief that wives have a specific and clearly
defined responsibility here is verified by the fact that _husbands want,
and business demands, one and the same thing_. The approach is
different, because the husbands of America are asking primarily for
harmony at home, while business is looking for an efficient producer;
yet they both are seeking the same thing. The husband asks his wife for
harmony at home and a progressive instinct so that she will grow
concurrently with him. Business, when evaluating men for promotion, asks
whether there is harmony at home so that this man will be free from the
greatest single source of emotional unbalance, and whether this man and
his wife have demonstrated the ability to grow in the past--the best
available indication of their ability to grow in the future. These two
questions take in a lot of territory, but the ground must be covered so
long as business, in effect, employs or promotes both husband and wife.

Do not be misled for a moment respecting the importance of these two
points merely because businessmen do not talk a lot about them. Their
sense of good taste makes them hesitate to inquire bluntly into so
personal a problem, and so their investigations are conducted quietly.
Numerous confidential sources of information are used, and superiors
take their own means to meet husband and wife together, generally under
some casual pretext. If we could look behind the scenes, we would find
that emotional stability--that elusive product of a satisfactory home
environment--is regarded just as highly as knowledge, experience, or any
of the other orthodox considerations. We would find executives saying,
"We can count on Jones for Chicago now that we have seen his wife and
determined to our satisfaction that she will measure up to the
promotion" or "It's too bad we can't give this job to Smith, but you
know how hard it is to succeed without support from home." Another would
be saying, "Brown flew off the handle again yesterday; it must