Dorothy Dix has been currying a lot of favor for the last few weeks, but this week's advice may be a bit more controversial. In a column first printed on December 17, 1940, she weighs in on the issue of publicizing adultery.
Dear Miss Dix - I have been married for 30 years. My husband has been kind to me and a good provider, but he has always been a philanderer. Recently I discovered that he had been having a love affair with a young business girl in our home town and that this had been going on for five years. I came across some love letters in his coat pocket from this girl. After reading them I passed them on to my 15-year-old daughter and also to several friends. Finally I gave them to the girl’s employer to read. I knew he was a man of high morals and that he would dismiss the girl if he knew of her conduct. He did so reluctantly, for she was a very competent and dependable worker. Now I would like to know whether I did wrong in publishing my husband’s shame to the world and causing the girl to lose her job?
MRS. L. M. D.
Answer - It is easy to see how a wife, driven mad by discovery of her husband’s infidelity and with jealousy of the woman who has supplanted herself in his affections, does things in the stress of her emotions that are neither wise nor right. Much excuse is to be made for her. Not many of us can be calm and judicious in our reasoning when our hearts are torn to tatters and our world is crumbling about us.No one can wonder that in your fury at being betrayed you took the first means at hand to revenge yourself upon your husband and his lady love. But you have found, as we all do who try it, that revenge is not as sweet as we thought it would be. It is gall and wormwood in our mouths. For it makes us do and say things that we spend our lives in regretting.
I know that you must be very sorry that you showed those incriminating letters to your young daughter, because they shattered her ideal of her father and forever killer her respect for him.
Never again can he be a hero in her eyes. She will always see him as an amorous old man having a sordid intrigue with a girl and double-crossing his wife. To the young elderly Romeos are not romantic. They are disgusting.
No matter how your husband has treated you, you were not justified in hurting your daughter in order to hurt him. To shake a child’s faith in her father is almost as bad as to shake her faith in God.
And you must also be very sorry that in the fury of your passion you blazoned your husband’s shame to the world, because that puts you in such an undignified position if you go on living with him. The only way a married woman can save her face when she has a philandering husband is to pretend that she does not know about his infidelities.
7 comments:
I have to agree with Miss Dix in regards to showing the letters to the 15 year old daughter. That was not a good thing to do. As for showing the letters to the other woman's employer, well I can't fault the wife there for lashing out, but in todays society, the employer would likely advise her to address her domestic issues at home.
And now that she has broadcast to the world about her husbands infidelity, she looks like a fool if she stays with him.
Wendy
Oh-My-Goodness! Not only would I not have written in, in the first place, I would not have taken her advice had I done so.
The wife who would have done as she said, I am sure is far more Christian than me, so I guess that I have a ways to go.
I've always wondered at what point in time it finally became unresepctable for a woman to stay with her cheating husband. When did women start drawing the lines? When did society finally quit saying "Oh, he's just a man!"?
I know there are still a few cases of this today, but more often than not, if a woman tells someone their husband is cheating, everyone's first response is to confront him or leave him. There's not much casting a blind eye to it these days.
I agree that she should not have shown the letters to her daughter. Confronted her husband, yes, but kids--even older kids--shouldn't be dragged into adult conflicts as confidantes. The girl should have been told, but not in such a lurid, voyeuristic, manner.
I think the step of telling the girl's employer is something that has mostly gone by the wayside with time, at least at that level. I doubt she'd have been fired today, and I doubt he'd have been fired then, but I think that must have been a common consequence at the time.
As for the last paragraph of the answer: Well, thank goodness nowadays we can divorce him without tarnishing ourselves irretrievably!
I agree that the teenaged daughter should not have been drawn into her mother's troubles by going to the extent of showing her the letters. Ms. Dix does a good job in my opinion telling the writer why she shouldn't have destroyed the child's image of her father. If the mother had decided to separate from the father, then some sort of explanation would have to be given to the daughter, but even then she could have been spared all that detail... The mother would be unlikely to meet with any "assistance" from the young woman's employer were she to try the same thing today. Judging from her pangs of conscience now, I'm sure the writer was acting out of terrible pain in everything she did and must be a quite kind and generous person fundamentally.
Amber, you pose a great question. I guess that line had not yet been been crossed by 1940 judging by Dorothy Dix's response to this letter. It probably took until women really had some good opportunities in the workplace - and leaving your husband was a financially viable option - before sweeping "philandering" under the rug was no longer the go-to choice in cases like this.
My mother's parents were married for 19 years (from the 1940's-1960's) before divorcing when my mother was 4. For those 19 years my mother's father had innumerable affairs. My grandmother would find out, inevitably, and ask him if he wanted a divorce. Of course he never did, and would end it, only to begin another one later. In the end, my grandmother left him because she didn't want my mother thinking that that was okay.
I agree with Miss Dix that the daughter should have been left out. As for causing the woman to lose her job, well, that wouldn't work these days, but that would be the least of her worries if I had been the woman scorned! Obviously if you're upset enough to show your daughter and others in town then you should be upset enough to leave him butt once and for all. Blind eye or no blind eye, the man should have known to at least keep it out of town. I would think at this point the woman would have realized others in town must know.
Kalee, what a sad story - though it sounds like your grandmother is a very wise, far-thinking woman.
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