Woman's Great Ideals

Thrift and Dignity are the two ideals to which women tenaciously cling and that are most misunderstood by men. The one can be interpreted as stinginess and the other as suppression. So says the revered G.K. Chesterton.

"Thrift is the really romantic thing...thrift is poetic because it is creative." Men, he argues, are somewhat cavalier about throwing money around and away, but "many a good housekeeper plays the game [of thrift] every day with ends of cheese and scraps of silk, not because she is mean, but because she is magnanimous...she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her works."

"Thrift is part of that great idea of the woman watching on all sides out of all the windows of the soul and being answerable for everything. For in the average human house there is one hole by which money comes in and a hundred by which it goes out; man has to do with the one hole, woman with the hundred."

Woman's other ideal, Dignity, is set over against man's Rowdiness. "The woman has a fixed and very well-founded idea that if she does not insist on good manners nobody else will. Babies are not always strong on the point of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpresentable. It is true that there are very many polite men, but none that I ever heard of who were not either fascinating women or obeying them." :-)

We are the stingy kill-joys, Ladies, and Mr. C. says both are necessary for the healthy function of home and society.