Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 10, Number 48, DeMotte, Jasper County, 17 October 1940 — Kathleen Norris Says: Any Woman Can Learn the Secret [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Kathleen Norris Says: Any Woman Can Learn the Secret

(Bell Syndicate—WNU Service.!

By KATHLEEN NORRIS

BE A contented woman. So few women are content! This advice is not for the thirties. Not for the forties. These years are full of hope and changes and potentialities and excitements. The most thoroughly disappointed and bored and disillusioned wife of 34 may still feel that a complete change of circumstances may take place any day. Jim might get a promotion with a big raise. Or some unsuspected uncle might leave them a tidy fortune. Or they might have to move to Rio, on 10 days notice. Or the talent scouts might seize upon the baby, who is 10 timesj as fascinating as any baby star on the screen. Life holds thrills. A new hat—a new hair-do, is a thrill. Just meeting a courteous new man is a thrill. To have someone suggest a delightful job opens up new trains of thought.! A hundred a month, and a Rummer vacation free, for just being hostess at a big mountain hotel. A New Cycle Begins. All this ends at about 45. No use fooling about it, it comes to an end. No more men are going to fall in love with you. No new hat is going to do for you what that $1.98 hat did 20 years ago. Jim isn’t going to be raised, promoted, sent to an exciting post. He’s there, stout and middle-aged and comfortable and quite satisfied to go on living. The children have passed the absorbing and dependent stages; they need teeth bands and corrective shoes and plenty of school help, but there is little in that to satisfy the woman who has been dreaming all her life of achievements, of fame, wealth, glory, success. If you are one of those women, harness your dreams. Or better still, wake up and try to appreciate one important fact.

This is the fact. No matter how young, beautiful, rich, successful a woman is,} sooner or later she has to find content exactly where you can find it. In her own soul. What Price Fame. Of course she likes the excitement of success, the flattery of her public, the brief, brief hours in which her fame eclipses that of the next exquisitely pretty and captivating woman, But those things last only hours or days, or months at most, and then the gnawing inner hunger for reality begins to fret her. Hollywood sets are not reality; cameras snapping in her face wherever she goes are not reality. She loves them, of course, and when they stop, when she is only yesterday's favorite, she sutlers agonies of jealousy. And she knows all along that they are not real. She puts on a S4O apron and cooks in a picture-book kitchen. She adopts a baby, and is photographed with it. And all the time she is blindly reaching out for what you have; a man who needs her, a kitchen in which she is queen; a small person to come stumbling to Mother. At 40 she has nothing left. The booking agencies in New York, the casting offices of Hollywood are filled with unemployed, wistful women who were stars a few years ago. Their sugar-frosting dream is over. The bubble has burst. And then, unless they have something very real with which to go on; family ties, the right to love and service, they are drejary derelicts for life. The lives of very few elderly actresses are lifted out of tragedy. Content Is Secret of Happiness. Even highly successful professional women don’t go on to happy middle life unless they’ve discovered the secret of content. Too often young fame distracts them from the

natural course of marriage and motherhood, and they find glory and money rather poor pickings in the end. • And the merely rich women! The glamour girls who have done nothing to earn their luxury and power, their yachts and Palm Beach mansions, their furs and jewels4-what a sad mess THEY make of it! Within a few years of the time when you went around all morning wishing you were in Gloria Millions place, Gloria is haggardly facing a second "divorce, supporting a flattering circle of titled European hang-ers-on, and telling the .whole world that she will fight for the custody of her child. Whereas you, if you’ve played your cards wisely, are the adored mother of two brown tall Indians oi children who are dancing about !k ?ause it’s Saturday, and Mom is ta. : ng Jim and Mary and the Simmons children off to the beach for the day, • - . Ur you’re absorbed m your garden. there’s no heartache cure like a garden. You’ve decided to have supper out-of-doors. You’re trying for a prize contest on the air. Your Persian aristocrat has produced three delicious kittens. The baby next door has been loaned to you for his noon Pabulum and his afternoon hap. Jim is, thank goodness, going to be free for a three-day week-end next Friday. Mary is in first year French and it’s perfectly amazing hew your old grammar and you can help her. You’ve got to consider both sides of moving to that possible farm. Chickens and fruit and quiet and space against the commuting trip for Jim—. All Possess Materials for Happiness. In short, you’ve mastered content. You’ve learned that to each one of us women in this life is meted out the materials for happiness; it is only our wisdom or stupidity in handling them that makes the difference. The successful writer, actress, heiress of course MAY be happy. But she has to be happy on exactly the same terms that are available to you. She has to have love, and a chance for service, and books and appetite and deep sleep. And often these are all sacrificed before she has discovered how perishable is fame, how brief is youth, how little money can buy! While you are climbing up the scale to the forties and fifties, she is descending to depths that you never knew. Face-lifting and cocktails and memories of past splendors don’t help her; nobody remembers and nobody cares. Develop what you have. The children, the back yard, the possible picnic and camping sites within reach, the libraries, the swimming beaches. Develop hobbies, activities. interests. They don’t spring into being full-grown. But you will be pleasantly surprised to see how fascinating they can become. Develop Jim, too. As you grow to be a contented middle-aged and someday old woman, take him along with you. Make the fifties happy years, and the sixties even better. The woman who does that will soon find herself in a position to pity the very stars and glamour girls and celebrities that she is envying today. And most important of all, develop yourself. Try to achieve that peace of mind which can only follow from a life well lived, because as eagerly as you are now looking ahead to new thrills, in your old age you will look back upon the pleasures that have been yours.

Cameras snapping in her face wherever she goes are not reality. She loves them, of course, and when they stop she suffers agonies of jealousy. No matter how young, beautiful, rich, successful a woman is, sooner or later she has to find content where )01 find it. In her own soul.