People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1896 — WIVES OF GERMANS. [ARTICLE]

WIVES OF GERMANS.

AN AMERICAN GIRL’S POSITION WHEN SHE MARRIES A BARON. Ho>w She Has to Economize'ln the Useoi Her Own Honey—An Authority on the Subject Writes For the Benefit of Young Women In This Country. Few questions have been pnt to fne as a test to my foreign experience oftenei than the familiar: ‘Ought American girls to marry German men? Are such unions happy? Do they turn out well! What class of men is it tha# step outside the beaten track of home matrimony to seek American wives and transplant them into the life of the fatherland?” writes Baroness von Wedel in Cosmopolitan. In respect to the marriages of American girls with German men, they may be approved of safely in the cases of practical, worldly minded women and of very young pr of very gentle tempered girls. Wives who possess little sentiment or only soft sentiments yield readily to their environment, the latter giving way unconsciously, and hence without pain, the former with foresight and with a purpose selfish enough, as we may assume, to recompense them for their renunciations. As for the class of willful, silly, pretentious women, they are happy nowhere. German society should not be called too harshly to account, therefore, if they are wretohed in marrying into it. We must concede, if we are fair minded, that they would have been just as discontented in any other geographical position as in the fatherland. The inquiry begins with our average girls. They represent American wives whose happiness is influenced by the specifically foreign traits in their husbands and their husbands’ society and surroundings. However they may vary in character, they are alike in their Americanism, and it is republican principles which alre opposed in them to the aristocratic education of the men of their choice. It is a false prejudice to suppose that these or the titled gentlemen who take American wives are mere fortune hunters and degenerated specimens of nobility. They are often men, it is true, who could not marry women without dowries, for gentlemen on the continent, as it must be kept continually in mind, are excluded from the chances of making money. 4 Where cases of dissipation of the great fortunes of American wives occur and are duly reported, two or three things are sometimes overlooked. The first is that, if the cases were not rare, they would hardly be considered worth offering to the public as shocking facts. The second is that the fortune evidently was limited. The next may surprise us, for it is a Iruth that has not not been realized by our homo staying countrymen—l mean the fact that foreigners lay the blame on the American wife. Why, the relatives ask, did she not bring more money into the connection?

What they mean, and what they feel justified by the usages of their class in meaning, is that young noblemen do nothing unusual in being extravagant. If the consort of such a man brings wealth enough for her to be luxurious, too, no objection to that is valid. But the head of the house is the member who is the representative of his rank, together with the that is suitable to it, and where the mutual fortune is circumscribed it becomes the duty of the wife to retrench her outlays in order to allow him to continue representing their station without too much danger of bankrupting the family means. German wives economize the more in proportion as their husbands spend. American born wives, on the contrary, have drawn the reputation upon themselves of being incapable of this sort of sacrifice. I have learned to look for the real tragedies among foreign marriages in the silent cases. These women of character and ambition, united in a fervid temperament, keeping their post like soldiers, are admirable wives often of admirable men, yet they endure the constant realization of the ohosen places of their thoughts being foreign to the ways and thoughts of theirhhusband and the world about them. There are modern women of strong and distinct lives whose inner principles are supreme protests against the system of living which their marriages unknowingly drew them into—exiles from the soil, and, above all, the soil of republicanism. Both law and custom grant men authority over women. The bride passes from the parental control into the control of her husband, and, if she live to be a widow, into that of her son.

Our girls know theoretically before marriage that they must be subservient to their husbands as German wives and that the obstacles to happiness lie in the path of wifely independence. The gentle footpath of submission is free from hindrance.