"Men don't understand," cries she. "Women are unreasonable," says he.

What are the causes of the change? Did the housewife of a past
generation go through the same stage? Ask any man you meet and he will
tell you his mother is or was more enduring than his wife. "She bore
three times as many children; she did all her own housework; she baked
more, cooked more, sewed more; she got up at five o'clock in the morning
and went to bed at ten at night; she never went out, never had a
vacation, did not know the meaning of manicure, pedicure, coiffure. She
was contented, never extravagant, and rarely sick."

So the average man will say, and then: "Those were the good old days of
simple living, gone like the dodo!" To-day,--well, it reminds me of a
joke I heard. One man meets another and says: 'By the way, I heard that
your wife was the champion athlete at college.' 'Ah, yes,' said the
husband; 'now she is too weak to wash the dishes.'

Is the average man's impression the correct one? Or are we dealing with
the incorrigible disposition of man to glorify the past? To the majority
of people their youth was an era of stronger, braver men, more
wholesome, beautiful women. People were better, times were more natural,
and there is a grim satisfaction in predicting that the "world is going
to the dogs." "The good old days" has been the cry of man from the very
earliest times.

Yet read what a contemporary of the housewife of three quarters of a
century ago says,--the wisest, wittiest, sanest doctor of the day,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. The genial autocrat of the breakfast table
observes: "Talk about military duty! What is that to the warfare of a
married maid of all work, with the title of mistress and an American