A DIFFERENT JILL FOR A DIFFERENT JACK
Your man will have changed when he comes back from the war, and it’s up to you to change, too, says this contributor, if you want your new life together to be a success.
Man Has Changed!
And he will expect “his woman” to change also!
The quiet, domesticated, stay-at-home-and-read-the-paper-by-the-fire husband has disappeared. The war tore him from his home and he has been drilled and disciplined into a very different thing.
And he will expect Jill to change also! The point is, will she?
The young Jill — the Jill who is bus-conducting, or making munitions, who is mixing with masses of men and women, who is learning self-control and endurance, she is altering as much as Jack is, but then she is growing up in this stirring, wonderful, independent present. It is the wife who is going to make a shipwreck of life.
The Jill who is not quite young, who grew up in the quiet, uneventful, stagnant past, who has never gone out and rubbed shoulders with her fellows. Her stride is not lengthening as she swings to work, like her younger sisters; she is till bound by small conventions, and her horizon ends with the outskirts of her own domain.
And she is expecting her 1914 husband to come home again!
He cannot! He does not exist! He has evolved into something absolutely different, and she will not like the evolution!
He has been facing big elemental facts, and the narrow little ruts of home life are not going to confine him any longer. He knows that there are wider and greater things outside, and the little petty domestic rules will bind him no more.
The greatest domestic disturbance will seem a triviality after the colossal upheavals that he has witnessed.
Is he going to trouble over one muddy footprint on the hall floor — he, who has lived in mud? Is he going to groan when the maid drops a tea-cup — he, who has seen shells drop?
He is too much alive!
And if his wife is sensible she will begin to live also!
She has slight hold on him now except the hold of love, for he no longer depends on her. Cooking and sewing have lost their terrors for him, and there is not much that the returned husband is not capable of doing for himself.
He has been living with men; he has been making a large number of “pals”, and he probably intends to keep them.
And they are possibly not quite the kind of friends that she has been used to. Don’t try to choke “our set”, and “class distinction,” and “losing caste” down his throat, he’s past all that. He lost it when they went over the top together.
In future he is going to choose his friends because he likes them, and not because they move in “our set,” or own a motor.
The success or failure of her future life is in Jill’s own hands. If she will only learn that there are more important things than door-mats, bigger things than the departure of a maid-servant, and more beautiful things than a super-orderly drawing -room, then Jack when he comes home will find a new Jill waiting for him, and he will give her a love and reverence that will far surpass the love that narrow, prosaic, pre-war-husband Jack gave to his still narrower and more humdrum pre-war-wife Jill.
[I'm not sure how accurate a prediction this was of the psychological state of the men who came home from the war, but certainly the warning that they would have been changed by the experience would have been valid. And it's notable that magazines were looking forward to the end of the war, when in reality, the end was not yet in sight and the outcome was far from certain.]
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