CHAPTER 15

FINANCE IN THE HOME

ONE asks, "Is it right for a woman to buy things she cannot afford, and thus bring that hopeless look to her husband's face, or shall she chance all and trust Providence to pay the bills?"

By all means live within your means!

You can't run your husband into such debts with a clear conscience. And with an uneasy conscience you can't "trust Providence" to any effect.

Keep your conscience clear and affirm opulence; but don't spend that opulence until you have it in hand.

To spend before you have the money is to gamble with the devil's loaded dice!

Seneca said rightly, "The man that would be truly rich must not increase his fortunes but retrench his appetites." Commanding your wants is three- quarters of wealth — the first three-quarters!

Emerson says, "A rush of thoughts is the only conceivable prosperity that can come to us."

But most of us are afflicted with a rush of wants that drowns honest thought.

Choke off the wants, dearie, and get down to your real New Thought. Don't try to pretend opulence by parading "fine clothes, equipages, villa, parks and social considerations" that are not really yours!

Make money first by saving it. Dollars have attractive power as well as people. To him who hath saved dollars more dollars shall flow.

In cutting off your flow of superfluous wants you find a dry river bed with dollars rolling up hill!

But maybe "that hopeless look" of your husband's is put on for effect! Maybe he can afford the things you want, but doesn't want to! Maybe he has discovered that "that hopeless look" saves money for him!

In that case strike for an accounting and a fair division of the money. Strike for a reasonable allowance. Every married woman ought to have an allowance and live opulently within it. Every man ought to be glad to grant such an allowance for his own peace as well as his wife's comfort.

He should pay his wife at least as promptly and generously as he pays his hired man or his stenographer. Why not?

The wise woman of today will not marry without a good business agreement to this effect. The woman who is growing wise by experience will strike for such an agreement, and keep on striking — or coaxing! — until she gets it. Here is a place for her to use all her New Thought ingenuity, faith, and love.

If your husband won't tell you the truth about his business, income, or profits get a Bradstreet or Dun's report on him!

Then coax him into making you an allowance, be it ever so small. Ask him to try it a month or two anyway. Catch him in a good humor, look your sweetest, and say "please" prettily.

“You ought not to have to coax, for what is rightfully yours?" Of course not! But you are dealing with a husband and a world, not as they ought to be, but as they are. See you adjust yourself accordingly, remembering that there are several matters in which you don't always act as you "ought" to.

Lay judicious siege to your husband's heart, and to his head — his sense of justice — and you will find his purse strings become more workable.

After you have once got a trial of the allowance system the whole thing rests with you. If you manage your allowance economically, taking great care never to overstep and never to fuss about it, your husband will quickly decide that such a method is better all round, and that he is proud of your managing ability. Once his faith is aroused in you and the allowance system, it will be easy to get as large an allowance as his means will afford. And your good management and faith will react on his and more dollars will flow into his pocket — and yours.

Perhaps you think this is a very old thought way of getting your New Thought "rights." It is. But it is the effective way, the right way and maybe the only way. It is nature's way — Eve eats first, then Adam. If the results are unpleasant you know what Adam says. If results are good — it all rests with Eve in this, case — Adam soon arrives at the stage of thinking it was his own idea and he knew it all the time.

Then — if she is wiser than most women — she will let him think!

It takes a man and a woman, anyway, to discover truth. And it takes the two of them to demonstrate it. Who cares which half gets the credit?

The woman who can let the man take the credit can have what she wants next time, even unto the half of his kingdom.

You see woman intuits an idea and suggests it to man. Man masticates and digests (reasons out) the idea. The two of them work it out in practice.

The more of a woo-man she is the more readily his cold reason warms up to its work.

In plain English, the more loving the woman the sooner she gets what she wants, especially when she has justice on her side.

Don't you see? This is a principle of nature — and Bernard Shaw. The woman woos man to want to please her by entertaining the idea she presents. Her sweet wooing softens his heart and warms his brain and being to action!

If the English suffragettes get what they are after it will be as ever through the women who fascinate and coax men, rather than by women, who lock themselves to the walls and screech for votes.

And this does not mean that the latter method is wrong or wholly ineffective. Such demonstrations serve to convince men that many women really want to vote.

The last step is to woo-man the men into wanting to give women the thing they want.

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