Love, Death & the Hubby Image

Incredible though it may seem, the above offer is completely legitimate. More than 40,000,000 Americans are already so employed, and -- give or take a few thousand dollars -- all are now enjoying most of the promised benefits.

There's only one catch to it: No men need apply.

The offer is addressed solely to single American women, and represents the unspoken, undefined, but strongly subliminal sales appeal presently contained in the age-old male proposal: "Will you marry me?"

Add to the many listed inducements the legal guarantee of exclusive sexual rights, innumerable opportunities for emotional self-expression, and the prospect of achieving psychological dominion over one to a dozen other human beings -- and we can begin to understand, perhaps, why more than a million-and-a-half American women annually consent to "give up everything" for the sake of marriage.

More difficult to understand, however, is the boundless altruism of the million-and-a-half American men who annually make such offers, and the strange sense of humility which causes them to feel fortunate and grateful to have such offers accepted.

"But there are such things as Love and Romance," a feminine voice is certain to remind us at this point.

And, indeed, there are. Few American men would deny the power of those soaring emotions, or minimize the mysterious enchantments of soul and psyche that transform their bachelor brethren into husbands at the average rate of something like 30,000 a week. The very concepts of romantic love and devotion are, as we know, masculine creations which have been sung and celebrated by male poets, novelists, composers and playwrights for at least 600 years. And in no century or land have these concepts been held in such universal esteem as in 20th Century America.

So sacrosanct is our belief in the idea of "marrying for love," that many Americans are totally unaware that marriage can have any other basis. "It will come as a surprise to many people to learn that this emphasis upon romantic attraction as the basis for marriage has not always existed," Dr. James H. S. Brossard, of the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a recent sociological study of Ritual in Family Living. "Not that romantic love is a new idea, for strong emotional attraction between individuals of opposite sex is obviously as old as the human heartbeat. What is new is the relative place accorded to romance.... The romantic complex, as it is often called, came into our Western culture with the French troubadours of the 12th and 13th Centuries, and has reached its most exalted position in recent American literature and practice, until today it emerges as the accepted cornerstone of the marriage relationship. Taking a worldwide view, and considered in the retrospect of time, romance as the basis of marriage is a relatively new social experiment, still confined to a minority of the world's peoples. Like the romantic stories of the 'pulp' magazines, it will be interesting to see 'how it comes out.'"

While awaiting the final payoff to this unique and noble experiment with human lives, an unexpected glimpse into some of the curious consequences that romantic marriage imposes upon the American male was recently forced upon my attention by the sudden loss of a young male cousin to marriage. The cousin, Jim, an outgoing and idealistic young man of high promise in his chosen profession, had, it seems, fallen victim to a deep-seated romantic complex centering about an attractive young schoolteacher in his native Cleveland, and after a brief summer courtship had announced to friends and family that he would have said girl to be his lawful-wedded wife, to love, comfort, honor and keep, in sickness and in health, till death did them part. When the date was set, Jim wrote me a buoyant note in which he expressed the hope that I would be on hand to serve as an usher at the ceremony, and otherwise rally round in support. I gave him my promise, and arrived in Cleveland two days early, prepared to cheer and bolster the prospective groom -- a needless task, as it developed, for the poor chap was already in a state of near-manic euphoria as he rushed happily about, ticking off the various prenuptial chores outlined in a "groom's check list" contained in the winter issue of a large but ladylike periodical called Modern Bride.

"Where the devil did you get that?" I asked, lapsing into strong language at the sight of a formally attired groom nuzzling the brunette bangs of a smiling young bride on the cover.

"Sue gave it to me," he (continued on page 192)Love, Death(continued from page 94) explained, with a kind of reverential emphasis upon the name of his beloved -- and off he dashed to the florist's for a preview of her going-away corsage, which he had dutifully ordered the week before.

Alone with my thoughts and a fourounce blast of an unfamiliar gin de jour, I hefted the well-thumbed magazine and read over the article titles listed on its cover -- a trio of modern-bridesy think pieces on such vital subjects as "Choosing Your Wedding Music," "Diamonds to Dream On" and "Honeymoon Ideas."

Curious as to what new and lively honeymoon notions the editors might have worked out for today's adventurous young newlyweds, I flipped through the book and found that Modern Bride's interest in nuptial nights and conjugal journeys was largely touristic. The best they had to offer was an illustrated travel guide to places like San Juan, Puerto Rico ("You'll pass the Callejon de las Monjas -- the Lane of the Nuns ... and the Rare Book Museum whose collection includes books carried by Christopher Columbus on his voyages to America. You'll also pass stores like Dolphin Court and Martha Sleeper's and Casa Cavanagh ..."), Quebec ("Some of the dream quality lasts on into your first shopping trip here as well, for you'll find your dream china at prices well below those at home. Silver, sweaters, seal slippers, Lalique glass, English and Scottish woolens, linens -- you'll find them hard to resist."), and Cartagena, Colombia, where there didn't seem to be a hell of a lot to buy except some local seafood and fruit drinks.

For newlyweds who might be hesitant to venture south of the border or north of Schroon Lake, there were advertisements for domestic honeymoon hostels on the order of Mount Airy Lodge ("You'll be part of a gay, fun-loving group of Honeymooners, whose days and nights are filled with a 'whirl' of activities"), and the "fabulous 'new Mr. & Mrs.' cottages at Merry Hill in the picturesque Pocono Mountains," which boasted such alluring extras as hayrides, hula classes, wienie roasts, sleepyhead breakfasts and a pizza pantry. Though all but the most oblique references to marital intimacy were discreetly avoided, the possibility that some couples might want to sneak away from the gang long enough to try their skill at sleepyhead lovemaking was anticipated by at least two advertisers who had a couple of rare old books to sell: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Sex, and the new 44th edition of A Marriage Manual -- thoughtful, authoritative tomes that purported to answer such age-old connubial conundrums as, "What causes climax in women?" "Is a human egg like a bird's?" and "Who is fit for marriage?"

Skipping the egg question, which could be of interest only to inquisitive Brownies, a quick scanning of the other ads left the impression that the modern bride might be moved to experience a rather profound orgasm upon receiving a gift of name-brand bath towels, and that fitness for marriage depended less upon her ability to win the love of the right man than upon her ability to promote the right wedding gifts. "Assert yourself. But be sweet about it," a slender bride in a white gossamer veil advised the reader in a typically romantic pitch. "Right now everything's going your way -- you've got him. And, of course, everybody loves a bride. So isn't this a pretty good time to be specific? You'll get off to a flying start in your first kitchen by mentioning Hamilton Beach...."

Hamilton Beach, it should be explained, was neither a seaside honeymoon resort nor the groom's name, but the trade handle for a line of kitchen appliances. Since none of the advertisers was in the business of selling pop-up husbands or fully automatic fiancés, the groom seldom entered the picture. When he did, it was only as a kind of well-heeled walk-on -- a mute and adoring minor figure who would bring home the status and serve to legalize the girl's big love affair with a set of silverware. On one page, an array of seven erect teaspoons was offered as suitors for milady's affection: "Penrose, and 6 other Wallace favorites ... which one will you marry?" In another full-page wedding spread, the ardent silversmiths made bold to counsel the marriage-minded miss on "How to marry the right sterling and live happily ever after!"

But these are just advertisements, I reminded myself. If the Romantic Ideal comes in for a royal roughing up, and the American girl seems to view marriage purely in terms of acquiring stuff and glomming on to a male provider -- what else can you expect? -- that's what moves merchandise. Shaking off the disturbing realization that such grossly materialistic appeals could not possibly succeed in motivating the modern bride to patronize an advertiser if his picture of marriage were truly at variance with her own, I turned hopefully to the magazine's text, expecting to find that the editors had made an effort to bring the advertisers' acquisitive, thing-oriented view of holy matrimony into a richer and more meaningful perspective.

But not so. In addition to offering a display of "Diamonds to Dream On" at insomnia-provoking prices of up to $12,860, the editorial content provided little more than a shop-at-home showcase for the wedding gowns, furniture, silverware and other household impedimenta featured in the ads. The bride's dream china was pictorially mated with her spoon-grooms in "18 Ways to Set a Pretty Table," while the romantic setting of the wedding night was but sketchily suggested in four pink fashion plates of sleepwear whimsies comprising "A Bride's-Eye View for You Know Who." If anything, the groom appeared to be even more subsidiary to the purpose of marriage than the ads had led one to believe. A brief black-and-blue view of the male wedding wardrobe was presented on the ground that "the well-groomed groom makes a bride look twice as beautiful," while the only other textual treatment of the male lesser half was in a prenuptial agony feature, called "The Wall of Moodiness," by Eleanor Hamilton, Ph.D., Marriage Counselor. "Dear Dr. Hamilton," a distressed young lady named Anne wrote in the classical letter form favored by most female complaint departments. "My fiancé has moody spells, when a silence like a curtain draws down around him, shutting me out. It isn't the quiet companionship of warm, unspoken thoughts but more like a wall that I can't penetrate. Occasionally it feels like anger, though I hardly dare admit this even to myself. It leaves me helpless and cold and I don't know how to reach him ..."

With considerable compassion and insight, Dr. Hamilton explained that "Moodiness is frozen feeling," and communication a two-way street. "Perhaps he tries to tell you something and you don't hear it," she suggested. "Or if you hear, you don't appear to pay attention or you brush it off as silly, unimportant or insignificant." Considering the short shrift the groom got in all other departments of Modern Bride, such offhand behavior on the part of its gentle readers was no more than to be expected. By implication, Anne's fiancé had been a normally communicative type when she "got him," but now, suddenly, the cat had his tongue. Why? I wondered. Was it just a spell of teaspoon envy brought on by Anne's echoing the "I Love My Silver" theme? Or was it a deeper case of fiancé funk resulting from the discovery that Anne's "Love of the Season" bridal gown, pictured on page 77, had been made by a manufacturer named Fink?

In all likelihood, however, Anne's man was as oblivious to the get-him-give-me marriage concept presented by Modern Bride as was my cousin Jim, who dipped into his presentation copy only in order to keep abreast of the groom duties contained in a stitched-in booklet with the lower-case title, "modern bride plans a perfect wedding." Of course, someone has to plan these things, I reflected, especially since there is no comparable men's magazine called Modern Groom.

The mere idea of a consumer magazine for young grooms was an absurdity, I realized. Conditioned, as the American male is, to think of love in terms of giving, and marriage as a romantic liaison between himself and the greatest girl in the world, material aggrandizement and the hardware of homemaking play little part in his prenuptial thoughts, and any suggestion that he might be capable of an amorous attachment to a teaspoon would most likely be rewarded with an indignant belt in the jaw. Unlike women, who quite often make "sensible" marriages in which romance is presumed to go hand in hand with economic and social advancement, the overwhelming majority of American men marry purely and simply for love. Since female dowries have been romantically and democratically dispensed with, a man must marry a girl for herself alone -- there isn't anything else.

As I sat in my light-brown study, sipping offbeat gin, it struck me as all-the-more remarkable, therefore, that so many Americans should continue to labor under the centuries-old delusion that men are, by nature, hard-headed realists, and women romantic, otherworldly creatures who will sacrifice all for love. Representing, as it does, nothing less than a complete switch of temperaments and types, this time-honored confusion is, of course, quite acceptable to women, who find it flattering to both their subconscious and avowed purposes. Because the young bride's romanticism is taken for granted, her preoccupation with gifts and gear -- during what is surely the supremely romantic period of her life -- can be interpreted as feminine nest-building, stemming from a womanly desire to create a cozy mating bower and a secure home for her future offspring. That the bride herself is the first and foremost to enjoy the coziness and security, most men would readily admit. But, as practicing romantics, they are quick to accept the chivalrous view that by feathering her nest, a woman is but acting in obedience to the same mysterious instincts that govern the behavior of mating doves, momma bears and lovelorn lady kangaroos.

For obvious feminine reasons, the animal-instinct theory is seldom considered a valid excuse for the human male to obey his equally natural inclination toward polygamous sexual activity, and no mention is made of the fact that the household arrangements of most birds and beasts are extremely casual and temporary. The mating cycle of our furred and feathered friends is so brief, and the self-sufficiency of the female and her young so complete, that no sire of the forest, sky or ocean deep is ever required to spend the remainder of his life working to support the female and her progeny. And nowhere does the male animal, bird, bug or tribal savage experience such an incredible loss of prestige by reason of mating and parenthood as among present-day Americans.

While the single man still remains the fictional hero of popular romance, and is granted the courage, intelligence, wit, charm and resourcefulness to win the love of a fair young lady, the mass-media portrait of the married male is predominantly that of a faint-hearted, bumbling idiot -- a commuting clown who falls off ladders, trips over the kids' toys, and is snatched from the brink of physical, social and economic disaster only by the superior intelligence of his wife, children and dog. Regardless of age or former accomplishments, the American man is automatically demoted to the rank of an incompetent dimwit the moment he surrenders the wedding ring. Simply by saying "I do," he is transformed from a handsome, gray-eyed world beater into a goggle-eyed jerk in a Genius-at-Work apron, who burns the steak, paints himself into corners, and causes geyserlike leaks to spring from the plumbing. In April, he's a mathematical moron who pulls his hair at the sight of an income-tax form, and for the rest of the year he's a four-star slob who snores on the sofa, drops ashes on the rug, raids the refrigerator, lets dishes pile up in the sink, and refuses to get out of bed at three A.M. to investigate strange noises.

Discouraging as it may be to the young male romantic with honorable intentions, this is the portrait of all the lawfully wedded males whose lame-brained antics provide the cues for canned laughter on our weekly, daily and hourly "situation comedies" -- the classic mass-communications tintype of the American husband that has been handed down to us through Jiggs, Andy Gump and Dagwood Bumstead. But the caricature is by no means confined to the vulgar vacuum of commercial TV. With varying degrees of sophisticated shading, it is also the likeness of the married man most often presented by Hollywood and Broadway. We find it not only in the funny papers, but on the editorial page, where it is used to symbolize John Q. Taxpayer -- and each week it is redrawn and retyped to reappear in the cartoons and light fiction of our leading magazines.

In a typical October week, The New Yorker (hardly a lowbrow, low-income comic book) lightly lampooned the workaday inadequacy of the American male in no less than six cartoons. A random sampling of two handy issues of Look from the same month turned up more than a dozen humorous put-downs of the hapless, helpless male, including a switch on the flooded-bathroom bit in which the obtuse, apelike husband stood scrubbing his back, waist deep in water, and a kitchen scene in which Junior asked Mom, "Should I take Dad some coffee? He's trying to change the bathroom mirror to another channel." For a wife's-eye view of You Know Who, my Cleveland Aunt Ida's Good Housekeeping went cliché all the way with "A Guide to Daddy-Bird Watching," a laughpacked feature composed of funny drawings of Father as a "Big-billed desk thumper," a "Rosy late-for-bus road runner," and a "Black-whiskered red-eyed Sunday snoozer."

Since the phenomenon is neither new nor rare, examples of such down-with-Daddy husband razzing are so numerous that it would take no more than a few minutes to fully document a charge of pictorial sadism, verbal castration or symbolic patricide. Literally any old pile of newspapers or popular magazines would serve, for this composite caricature of the moldy breadwinner and executive basket case is all that remains of the once-dominant Father Image. In all its asinine, accident-prone ineffectuality, it is the great American Hubby Image -- the official portrait of the married male with which our society laughingly trumps the wedding photos of all the "Rosy eager-for-romance road racers" and "Well-heeled clear-eyed Saturday swingers" who make the apparently stupid blunder of marrying for love.

While communicators, psychologists, and the public at large continue to speak of the Father Image as a cultural and political reality, it will be noticed that the concept is seldom defined and rarely exemplified in the person of any living American. When last heard from, the Father Image was being tentatively invoked to explain the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower to a second term as President, in 1956, but the phrase fitted the man no better than it fitted Harry S. Truman, or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, on whom it was so often laid. Only by the severest stretch of semantics could national fatherhood be attributed to men who were so obviously and publicly Bess' Harry, Eleanor's Franklin, and Mamie's Ike. George Washington was a Father Image, perhaps, and possibly Mary Todd Lincoln's husband Abraham. But for more than 30 years at least, the office of President has been occupied by mature family men whose personal lives and official conduct require that we think of them in terms of a fully spelledout Husband Image, with muted overtones of Dad.

Since the election of a younger family man in the person of John F. Kennedy, however, the Presidential image has at times come quite close to the national average of Hubby and Daddy. If the President has not yet been depicted on television in the act of tripping over Caroline's skates, he has been the good-natured butt of an unprecedented number of cartoons, coloring books and domestic-comedy routines. Nor can it be said that such First Family funnies are totally without foundation. As an example of life copying art, television fans could hardly miss the "I Love Jackie" TV potential in news shots of Mrs. Kennedy and Baby John peeking around a hedge at Daddy's official lawn reception for a visiting dignitary, while the thunder of a 21-gun salute was punctuated by treble shouts of "Bang, bang!" from Caroline and her little friends.

Granted the youthfulness and charm of the eminently photogenic First Lady, and the inability of news photographers to control their 35-mm reflexes in the presence of cute little girls and infants, it was inevitable that much White House reportage should be scaled down to the ranch-house level of birthday parties, pony rides, shopping trips and interior decoration. Regardless of politics, such reports on the domestic lives of famous American husbands are avidly consumed by the nation's vast audience of wives, who are religious in their belief that behind every successful man there lurks a good woman, without whose wifely aid and inspiration Mr. Big would probably be sorting nuts and bolts at 63 cents an hour. This comforting female conviction applies to all fields of masculine endeavor. If the struggling novelist's wife hadn't sat around in hair curlers saying, "You can do it, George," the sensational best seller might never have been written. If the world-famous scientist had gone to work that rainy morning without having a wife to remind him to take along an umbrella, Project Mankind might have had to be canceled because of the sniffles, and she never would have known the quiet joy of being Mother of the X-Bomb.

In a Hubby-Imaged culture, it may be taken as axiomatic that the higher a married man goes, the greater the connubial coverage on television and in the press. When, after years of intensive personal preparation, the lonely astronaut is blasted into space in the nose of a man-made rocket, it is an unwritten law of the mass media that his marital ties increase in direct proportion to his distance from the earth. As he hurtles through the ionosphere in his tiny capsule, he may experience the giddy sensation of weightlessness, but he will never be allowed a moment's illusion of wifelessness as long as the cameras are on hand to document his little woman's reactions as she bravely waits out the agonizing hours in an earthbound armchair. Her every sigh, gasp and furtive tear is put into the public domain for the leisurely consumption of other chairborne wives -- good women all -- whose own rosy late-for-bus breadwinners have been safely launched for an all-day orbit at the office.

It is also part of fate's format that during the long hours of the lonely birdman's postflight debriefing, his mother-in-law, parents and kids are rocketed to national prominence. In support of his wife -- who has by this time cried and laughed her way to stardom -- they smile and wave, and exuberantly tattle all the homey, heart-warming little anecdotes and confidences that will bring the hero's image back down to earth for good. By the time the hubbynaut himself turns up in a business suit to give an account of his flight at the big televised press conference, the personal and technical details have been so thoroughly chewed over that his story sounds like a third rehash of one man's experiences with a new power mower. Since the audience knows as much about the old retro-rocket bit as he does, the cameras are free to focus on the warmth of his wife's expression, and wander over the clean facial pores of her two courageous kids who have bravely sacrificed a whole week of school in order to stand by their dad in his moment of personal triumph.

Before switching channels for another hilarious episode of Make Room for Daddy, the male bachelor of science and history-minded husband may be moved to reflect that this merchandising of Space-Age heroes as Hubbies wrapped up in a large, family-size package, is a rather unique development in the saga of exploration. Was there a Mrs. Christopher Columbus? One wonders. Did Ponce de León and Amerigo Vespucci owe it all to the wife and kids? What of Lewis and Clark? Amundsen and Scott? Were they married? Was the dramatic race to reach the South Pole by sled presented to the world from the point of view of two worried wives whose hubbies had gone out in the snow one night to exercise the dogs?

Since it is possible for a man to become a father without being any woman's husband, it is fairly safe to predict that the Father Image will never again serve as an honorable symbol in our two-party, Mr. & Mrs. democracy. The Hubby Image is in, and marriage is a primary prerequisite for male advancement, both in outer space and within the inner circles of the American corporation. In virtually every field of employment the independence of the single man is equated with latent irresponsibility, and his personal motives and behavior are socially and sexually suspect. So strong and deep is this prejudice against the unwed career man, that a modern American Columbus without connubial ties would find that a large segment of society would be inclined to attribute only the basest motives to his efforts to discover a new passage to India and prove that the world was round. By setting sail in the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, he would automatically lay himself open to several whispered allegations: (1) That he really wanted to prove that Indian women were round; (2) That he was a homosexual in high spiked heels who had a passion for Italian sailors; and (3) That he was trafficking in books so dirty that they would have to be kept behind glass in the Rare Book Museum in Puerto Rico.

By the same token, a modern American Columbus would almost have to be single in order to consider embarking on such a lengthy and hazardous voyage. Regardless of any selfish scientific desire he might have to prove that the world was, say, square (as it most often seems to be), it is the American Hubby's oftcited Duty to Remember that his First Consideration should be for his Wife and Family. Before setting out to conquer new worlds, he Owes It to Himself, as a Husband and Father, to Seriously Consider, "How will this proposed venture of mine affect The Marriage? Am I being fair to Helen? Certainly, she didn't bargain for anything like this when she gave up everything to marry me. How will she ever manage while I'm away? Is it right to expect a woman to put out the milk bottles all by herself for two whole months? To wash and dry?"

One of the most attractive features of our Mr. & Mrs. space program is that -- despite all hazards -- the hubby's career need not too seriously disrupt the orderly pattern of married life. Schedules are so arranged that a wife can plan ahead, so it's never a case of keeping dinner waiting, or being caught in an old flannel bathrobe when George goes up at 11 A.M. on a given Tuesday. Though his salary is not astronomical, the mortality rate for American astronauts is happily lower than it is for young business executives, and the husband's position confers a generous amount of unearned prestige upon his wife. As the years go by, however, and space travel becomes more commonplace, it is to be expected that the astronaut's prestige will decline, and his image will become that of a cosmic bus driver whose Honey-I'm-home hubbyhood will be caricatured by some future Jackie Gleason on TV. Lamentable as this downgrading will be, the astronaut has at least been given his moment of family-packaged glory, and his job has been accorded a degree of dignity unknown to the majority of American men who must make their marks in such mundane fields as advertising, accounting and engineering -- for it is one of the great curiosities of our time that a man's work is generally considered to be the most ignoble thing about him.

While former generations have sung the praises of blacksmiths, lumberjacks, miners and railroad men, ours is the first in which the popular arts are committed to the wholesale spoofing of all masculine occupations. Witty though the assault often is, it is relentless in its insistence upon the absurdity, futility and infantilism of the means by which the American male is forced to earn a living. The hour does not go by when our merry mass media do not issue illustrated memos attesting to the occupational idiocy of businessmen, psychiatrists, clergymen, artists, inventors, chefs, surgeons, paper hangers, professors, plumbers, government officials, scientists, generals, taxi drivers, policemen, firemen, salesmen and safe-crackers. Commerce is for cretins, science is in the hands of squirrely saps, the arts are practiced by bearded asses, and the American business scene is presented in a series of blackout skits in which every man is a bottom banana. The joke, it would seem, is on all American males who are so foolish as to adopt any form of employment.

Since civilized humor has always played upon Man's awareness of his own inadequacies, it can be argued that this spoofing of the American male is far from new or peculiar to our time. What is new and unparalleled, however, is the fact that the image of the American man as a jerk at work and an imbecile at home has become the predominant -- almost exclusive -- image of more than 40,000,000 intelligent and productive human beings who have romantically mortgaged their youthful hopes, dreams and individual freedom in order to enter into a kind of marriage relationship which social scientists and historians have classified as a relatively new and minor experiment. The effect, moreover, has been to diminish the image of all American males, regardless of marital status. If a few bachelor gunslingers and unmarried medics are permitted to swashbuckle a bit within the narrow limits of Vista-Vision and the 21-inch tube, the legendary giants among men no longer roam the imagination. When the modern Casey Jones mounts to the cabin of his cartoon jetliner, the control panel is rigged with sight-gag gadgets, labeled "Coffee," "Tea" and "Milk." When John Henry Hubby swinga dat TV hammer to hang a picture for his wife, he invariably hitta his thumb. The only old folk song that still applies to the American male is Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, and the message that most frequently meets the eye is: A man is three-feet tall.

In broadest terms, perhaps, this use of all the powerful magic of our black-and-white arts to shrink American men down to handy purse size, may be attributed to the rising influence of feminism, in which Philip Wylie has foreseen the eventual and total "womanization" of America. Unquestionably, a society of sane men can no longer blink at the fact that almost all of our magazines, motion pictures, television, theater, books and newspapers are increasingly geared to meet the "needs" (i.e., "demands," "pleasures" and "whims") of American women, whose control of the consumer dollar has been estimated to be as high as 85 percent. To a great extent, certainly, the rise of hubby-drubbing and the increasing miniaturization of the American male will be found to coincide with the growth of commercial television, whose funny-sheet formats and predictable pulp plots are contrived to appeal mainly to the women and children who comprise our leading leisure and consumer groups. But if American women take pleasure in seeing the Hubby-Daddy-Bird portrayed as an occupational cuckoo and housebroken loon, it would be erroneous to suggest that women have been responsible for the creation of such caricatures, or that they seriously believe them. Realistic and literal-minded as most women are, they enjoy the joke only insofar as it succeeds in magnifying the wife's role without dwarfing the husband's ability to go out and win the bread, bacon, clothes, furniture, cars, appliances, entertainment, vacations, educations and country-club memberships which it has become every self-respecting American husband's duty to provide.

It is in the light of these duties and responsibilities, I think, that the Hubby Image is best understood, for the caricature of the hapless half-pint speaks less of the American male's dwindling competence and stature than it does of the growing enormity of his burdens. Like the Romantic Ideal, the Hubby Image is a masculine creation, and like the Romantic Ideal it has achieved universal acceptance only in 20th Century America, where men gallantly marry for love, and the female notion of connubial bliss is largely one of expanding consumer satisfactions, whether of goods, services, style, status, sentiment or sex. In essence, the Hubby Image is the portrait of a run-down romantic who heroically struggles to provide such necessities and niceties in ever-increasing abundance. It is the portrait, not of a gooney bird on the loose, but of a skylark in shackles -- a lawfully wedded dreamer who has painted himself into a corner of conjugal commitments, a vagabond lover whom the demands of modern marriage have transformed into a comically prudent prince.

In a sense, the American male's ability to view his predicament as an absurdity rather than a tragedy bespeaks an enormous strength and confidence. But the habit of humorous self-disparagement begins to give way to masochism when rosy early-for-class social critics and academic desk thumpers add to the overkill of male belittlement by castigating their fellow commuters with charges of gutless conformity. Surely, these gloomier-than-thou pundits, who are themselves employed to think and teach on schedule in our institutions of higher information, should realize that our much-reviled conformity is simply the product of the American male's romantically high sense of responsibility multiplied by the sum total of his obligations, debts and dependents. Considered in terms of the most rudimentary arithmetic and common sense, it should be obvious to everyone in long pants that American men are not to be condemned for want of masculine moxie, but hailed as a race of true heroes whose valor remains unsung.

At a period when the public ear is so sensitively tuned to the wave lengths of feminine complaint, it has become virtually impossible to speak so much as a word in favor of the American man in our mass media, without appearing hopelessly old-fashioned and unenlightened. After more than 70 years of feministic propagandizing for the American woman's God-given rights to liberty, equality, security and luxury, it is somehow "inconsiderate" to even discuss the wedded male as a human entity, or to factually describe the increasing erosion of rights and the growing magnitude of the sacrifice which American marriage imposes upon the male provider. Rare, indeed, is the honey-surfeited Russell Lynes who will risk the charge of literary wife beating to state that our romantic marriage views have deteriorated to the point where a girl now "takes it for granted that, when she marries, she is bound to get, almost as though it were a package deal, a husband who is also a part-time wife."

"To call him a wife is, perhaps, to put it too bluntly," Lynes adds. "He is rather more servant than wife ... Man, once known as 'the head of the family,' is now partner in the family firm, part-time man, part-time mother and part-time maid. He is the chief cook and bottle washer; the chauffeur, the gardener, and the houseboy; the maid, the laundress and the charwoman." For the few visiting Martians who may be so unfamiliar with our mores as to believe that he exaggerates, Lynes offers a clutch of inconsiderate statistics: "Crosley says that more than a third of the husbands in several of our northeastern states do the dishes, clean house and look after the children ... The Gallup Poll insists that 62 percent of American husbands are intimate with dishwater and about 40 percent help with the cooking. Kenneth Fink, director of the Princeton Research Service, has discovered that, in New York, 87 percent of the young men from 21 to 29 help with the housework ..."

To the young American male, the figure contained in the report of Fink the researcher can never be as meaningful and compelling as the figure contained in a "Love of the Season" bridal gown by Fink the manufacturer. Whether in New York, Natchez or Nome, each valiant young groom enters the bonds of matrimony in the romantic belief that he will be among the lucky 13 percent who somehow escape being drafted into the new Hubby-Daddy servant class. But no matter what his expectations, the statistics are against him, and the combined burden of job and housework falls heaviest upon the younger man. According to Lynes' findings, "there seems to be some slight advantage in growing older," since only 70 percent of men over 45 are required to serve as part-time flunkies for the wife and kids. This suggests "that patience and geriatrics may ultimately lick the husband's domestic problem." But it also suggests that men who manage to survive age 45 are more likely to be able to afford paid domestic help, or have accumulated enough laborsaving appliances to give them a few hours off each week. The trick, of course, is to be able to endure the daily crunch for a sufficient number of years to acquire the income needed to buy back a small fragment of the freedom a man so gallantly casts away in that moment of romantic enchantment when he asks some sweet and servantless young lady to become his wife.

Since, historically, men have had to create the romance which women, for the most part, can only consume, the romance of marriage fades in proportion to the amount of time and energy the young husband must devote to supporting his wife and family -- and the amount usually proves greater than he has ever been led to expect. Though he soon begins to buckle under the daily strain, he consoles himself with the belief that he is only doing what men have always done -- working to supply food and shelter for his near and dear ones. If anything, he imagines himself to be considerably better off than his grandfather, who had to put in much longer hours for a lot less pay. That the difference between the eight- and ten-hour day has been rendered meaningless in most cases by longer commutes and mounting household chores, is something he'd prefer not to think about -- just as he would rather not dwell on the fact that the salary differential between himself and Gramps has been dissipated by rising prices, taxes and the purchase of all the new and wonderful necessities Grandma didn't know were needed: two cars, three bathrooms, two television sets, a fully automatic clothes washer-dryer combination, a fully automatic dishwasher, a Deepfreeze, a wall oven, air conditioning, electric blankets, electric toothbrushes, three radios, two record players, a four-slice toaster, a two-car garage, a rotisserie, an electric can opener, a telephone with two extensions, and a multiplicity of other push-button genies and appointments.

Clearly, no prince, pasha or robber baron of the past was ever obliged to supply -- singlehandedly -- so much in the way of convenience and comfort, and the ancient feat of acquiring such wealth through acts of pillage or swindle cannot approach the difficulty of having to wrest it from the economy by means of honest effort. It was all the more inevitable, therefore, that man, the part-time servant and full-time provider of appliances, should himself become identified in women's minds with the labor-saving machinery upon which the American household has come to depend. Marketing researchers, for example, have long been aware of the American woman's tendency to respond to the washing machine as a subconscious symbol of the hubby as a wonder-working household slave, with erotic overtones of a masculine potency which never fails to cleanse the lady of the house of all "dirty" thoughts and desires, and leave her sexually spun dry. It was not until fairly recently, however, that my blessed Aunt Ida's Reader's Digest ran an ad in which a short, squat, square-as-all-Cleveland suds machine was actually depicted wearing a hubby's gray felt hat, while wifey leaned on him -- or it -- with two carefree elbows and a smile suggestive of complete coital release. "A good washer is like a good man," the copy purred, leveling its message right at the little woman's sleepyhead libido, "-- dependable, powerful, but with a touch as tender as love. Dependable? This sturdy Frigidaire Washer is designed to be the most service-free ... Powerful? The 3-Ring Agitator squishes detergents through clothes 330 times a minute! ... Tender? Pump-action, powerful as it is, is truly gentle with clothes. Creates very little lint...." In the same issue, the Westinghouse Laundromat, which claimed to be "a step ahead," was flash-photoed in the act of ejaculating a steady stream of money out of its port-hole at an ecstatic young wife who spread her little white apron wide to catch every last dribble of change. "And it pays off every washday," the heading chortled, like a professor of applied sexonomics. "... Its revolving tub lifts clothes up through the wash water, then gravity plunges them down for another dousing ... 57 times a minute ..."

To the male reader, the mental picture of a lint-free lover who operates at such speeds -- with his hat on -- smacks faintly of the sexual slapstick seen in some long-forgotten stag movie. But, actually, this plunging, clothes-lifting, pump-action prose is designed to squish through the female subconscious and arouse the psycho-erotic consumer passions of the housewife to the point where she will cross her legs and hope to buy. And it apparently works -- playing, as it does, upon the American woman's ideal hubby image of a maintenance-free man-machine that needs only to be plugged in once in order to go on working for a lifetime.

It is doubtful, of course, whether any woman in her right mind consciously believes her man to be a machine, but there is no gainsaying the fact that he is generally expected to perform like one. Unlike a machine, however, the human male cannot be redesigned each year to accommodate an added load of duties, anxieties and responsibilities. If a fourth dependent is born at a time when his career is in crisis, and the stock market is in a decline, and the world is suddenly threatened with an immediate outbreak of thermonuclear war, a man cannot be rewired or souped up to absorb the increased load. Unnatural and excessive though his burdens may become, he must carry them squarely on his natural shoulders, and manfully resolve to keep his wits firmly in place beneath his narrow-brim hat. Though his problems may dwarf him, he must somehow manage to stand up tall and continue to function from a mature height of approximately five feet, ten inches above the hard, cold ground.

While it's no secret that this heroic stance has become increasingly difficult for the average man to maintain, and the death rate for husbands continues to rise alarmingly in relation to that for wives, the American hubby has become so accustomed to meeting his responsibilities with machinelike dependability that he has mechanically accepted the unprecedented burden of having to exceed his own lifetime guarantee. Through neither the insistence of any religious doctrine nor the enactment of civil law, the American marriage contract has, during recent decades, been quietly and gradually extended to the point where death no longer releases a man from the obligation to keep and comfort his wife and family. He must not only deliver the highest standard of living on earth, but must work to achieve a standard of dying which will insure that his journey into the hereafter will have no more practical consequence for his survivors than a longish business trip to Hartford. By means of insurance and other accumulated assets, he must, in short, continue to provide meat, drink, bubble baths and Band-Aids for his dear and near ones, even from beyond the grave.

The novelty of this widely accepted obligation becomes apparent, I think, when one stops to recall that as recently as 60 years ago, most Americans considered life insurance an economic nicety -- a tidy little burial fund of about $500, which would cover Pop's funeral expenses and give Mom a few weeks to decide whether to keep or sell the family business. Since modern retailing and agricultural methods had yet to kill off the small shop and farm, many men had little need for such insurance, and could depart this life in the confidence that their wives or sons were almost as well-equipped as themselves to carry on the family business. As in past centuries, many husbands, wives and children still worked side by side, and few could even imagine a situation in which the husband alone would be required to produce all the family goods and services -- from machine-baked bread and lint-free laundry to custom-made drapes and continuous entertainment -- while his wife and children were enshrined as semisacred consumers.

Totally dependent upon the male provider's ability to pay off every payday, the modern family would obviously be reduced to utter helplessness by any sudden curtailment of income, and to this dangerously one-sided situation the American male has made a typically heroic and romantic response. Without even stopping to consider such practical (albeit benighted) solutions as a return to child labor, or the highly ingenious Hindu practice of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their deceased hubbies, the American man has gallantly undertaken to set himself up as a kind of free-lance Pharaoh and one-man slave corps, who nobly labors to build an enormous pyramid of economic assets -- not for his own immortal glory, but for the easy-come, easy-go temporal use of his widow and offspring.

Admittedly, the American man has not assumed this task without some rather artfully applied pressure. There are times, in fact, when the growing number of commuting Cheopses and part-time Tutankhamens seems to be as much the result of indoctrination as it is of spontaneous choice -- a possibility that was thrust upon my attention by the one-and-only personal wedding present my affianced cousin Jim received before marching off down the aisle to a romantic old tune by Felix Mendelssohn. Gift-wrapped, and mailed with the business card of an insurance-agent friend, the present turned out to be a slim volume of ... sonnets, perhaps? Love songs? Honeymoon jokes? No sirree bob! Good, solid, down-to-earth advice on how to Teach Your Wife to Be a Widow, by Donald I. Rogers, financial editor of the New York Herald Tribune.

Lest anyone suspect that the book was intended as a macaber jest, or doubt its appropriateness as a gift for the young groom, let me say immediately that Mr. Rogers had several pertinent comments to make about the importance of the marriage ceremony, and started right off with the slam-bang statement that "There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the language of the marriage vow." Indeed, the "majority of husbands take too literally that phrase 'until death do us part,' and fail to comprehend the meaning of an equally significant and binding pledge: 'With all my worldly goods, I thee endow.'

"That's the backbone of the contract," he warned, "and this 'until death do us part' business is no escape clause. Even after death, you're morally and legally committed to guard the welfare of the girl who signed the marriage license with you."

Disregarding an impulse to quibble with the notion that a deceased Daddy-Bird could be legally compelled to don his old one-button body and return in corpus to guard the girl he had so inconsiderately left behind, I at first took Mr. Rogers' opening paragraphs to be in the nature of a courageous and long-overdue plea to altar-bound males to reconsider the ominous overload of implications that the nuptial vow presently carries for the male pledgee. But such was not the case. As a hard-headed, dollars-and-cents realist, whose book was dedicated to his wife Marjorie, Mr. Rogers was not about to protest any inequities in the contract. Quite the opposite: he was merely lining out a new pitch for a little more consideration on the part of hubbies of all ages. "To most young and middle-aged Americans, death does not seem inevitable," he lamented. "This attitude prevails even though more young people are killed by highway accidents and more middle-aged men are felled by heart attacks in the United States than in any other country. 'It can't happen to me' is the amazing outlook of the majority, and it results in only the most casual consideration of what will happen to the precious wife and kids once the family magnate has killed himself in the race against taxes and living costs."

In Mr. Rogers' book, there was nothing particularly tragic or unusual about the family magnate's having to kill himself in this manner. But it annoyed him terribly to think that a man could be such a "plain fool" as to "work himself to an untimely death for the sake of acquiring a little wealth," and meanwhile neglect "to instruct his wife and other survivors what to do with it." Because if "it is to be dumped unceremoniously into the hands of a native and inexperienced wife, he has wasted his life and thrown away the basic motivation for his existence." In order that the dumping be properly ceremonious, and the missus prepared to wheel and deal on her own, Mr. Rogers believed it only "sensible and kind for a husband to spend years teaching his wife to be a widow." And, since even a young husband was liable to be called upstairs by the Big Boss in the Sky at any moment, it was "never too early to begin." In fact, the "ideal time to undertake the business education of a wife is the day a bridegroom returns to work following the honeymoon."

Whether my newly wed cousin had a chance to bone up on Mr. Rogers' book in time to terminate his honeymoon with a tender heart-to-heart chat on household accounts and the sophisticated subtleties of Odd-Lot Trading, I thankfully do not know. As he drove away with his bride at his side, he was still mercifully under the romantic illusion that death was not inevitable, and that he and his new little wife would live and feast on love forever. But if he had been reading, as I had, some of the few mass-media advertising appeals which are aimed specifically at the American hubby, he could not have made the first turn in the road without breaking out in a cold sweat of anxiety. The advertisements to which I refer are not the wholesome, optimistic ones for men's clothing, booze and snow tires, which carry the implication that the American male might stand a Chinaman's chance of living long enough to enjoy the use of the product -- but the growing number of creepy, crepe-hanging commercial pitches that prey upon the American husband's extreme vulnerability to accident and death, in order to sell him the "protection" he needs to build his pyramid of "family security."

Under the ghostly photo negative of a hospitalized hubby clutching his brow in despair, the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States sings its fullpage song of sickness and death in Life: "Do you have any idea what it costs to have a bad accident or to be sick for a long time? Don't forget that your normal expenses, your living expenses, keep right on going. You still have to meet the rent or the mortgage. You still have to buy food for your family. You still have to pay all those other bills that keep coming in month after month in addition to hospital bills ... doctor bills ... medicine ... nurses.

"If you're laid up, unable to work for months, or perhaps years, where would the money come from to pay all those bills? How long would your company keep you on the payroll? One month? Three months? Six months?

"How far would your hospitalization and medical insurance go?

"When your pay check has stopped and you've used up your hospitalization and medical insurance, how would you pay your bills? How long would your savings last? How long could you hold onto your home? After that, what would you do?"

Under a bright-red airborne umbrella, a young matron sits in the prow of a drifting dinghy, while her subteen son tries to manipulate the oars, and a younger child fumbles with the tiller: "How long could your family drift without you at the helm? To get a rough idea, take the total amount of life insurance you now carry, then divide it by what you consider to be an adequate annual income. Surprised? Then get under the Travelers umbrella of insurance protection ..."

Like a kindly old nursemaid, the New York Life Insurance Company puts a small blond boy to bed, and photographs his wonder as he asks, "Gee Dad, if everything costs money, what would we do without you?" The equally benevolent Nationwide Mutual gives the same appealing son image a space helmet, and plasters his picture all over a page of The Saturday Evening Post in order to speak a few friendly words "about your astronaut and Securance. Still some time 'til he's launched on his own ... Meantime, you and he both can count on Securance -- to guarantee his education, a home and mother's care if you're not there. Securance? It's down-to-earth insurance for everyone and just about everything.... For A-OK protection call your man from Nationwide. Only he offers you Securance. You'll find him listed in your Yellow Pages."

Day after day, and week after week, the American hubby is thus invited to attend his own funeral. This is the modern Daddy's Inferno: a highly commercialized hell of carefully calculated disaster, in which all pages turn Yellow, and icy fingers do the walking to find the name and telephone number of the nearest national, prudential guardian agent: "This is the Man your family may have to turn to some day ... choose him carefully. It's hard to imagine. And not a pleasant thought. But some day ..."

And just to make sure that it's not too hard to imagine, there's the Man's picture up above, as he gently places a consoling hand upon the shoulder of an attractive young widow. Like most modern wives, she has been fairly well-educated to accept the actuarial fact that hubbies must die, sooner or sooner. In her deepest grief she will, perhaps, recall a sensitive two-page "vignette" from the Travelers Insurance Companies of Hartford, which appeared in her very own Ladies' Home Journal. Presented in fiction form, and accompanied by an illustration in which a lithesome young wife in basic black leaned tenderly against her handsome hubby beneath a huge red umbrella, the piece served to dramatize one woman's realization of the meaning of insurance, and paved the way for future acceptance of the policy peddler as the widow's best friend.

"Laura couldn't stand the thought of anything happening to Frank ... ever." But tonight the insurance man was coming to help Frank plan the protection they needed for the future, and Laura was feeling a little upset. "Her mind raced back to the first time Frank had mentioned the words life insurance. Perhaps she was being foolish, even superstitious, but they sounded so ominous to her. And so cruel. As though she were putting a price tag on Frank. Then, Laura spoke aloud to the darkness. "I don't want that kind of money ... ever!'

"'Laura?'

"Frank was calling her. Dear Frank. He was doing it for her ... and for the children, too. She felt the blanket move beneath her fingertips. Joey tossed, then turned to her, sleep still in his eyes, as he said: 'Mom ...'

"'Shhh! Back to sleep now.'

"The man with the red umbrella, she thought. That's what Frank had called the Travelers man who was coming to see them that evening. The man with the red umbrella ...

"'Mom ... who's that red umbrella man?'

"Had Joey overhead them talking? Had he read her thoughts?

"'Well ...' she began slowly, having difficulty talking about it, even to a six-year-old who wouldn't understand, 'Well, the umbrella he carries isn't like other umbrellas. What it really stands for is insurance. Now you don't know what insurance is, and ... well, sometimes Mommy doesn't think she knows, either, but I do know this much: insurance is something that covers our house, and everything that's in it ... including you ... just like an umbrella. It protects us all, like an umbrella would on ... a rainy day.'"

This moving little fiction has as its sole purpose the arousal of a woman's security drives, and seeks to excite anxiety in a manner that borders on commercial obscenity. Dedicated to the stimulation of morbid imaginings, and the exacerbation of an insatiable lust for safety and comfort, it may be characterized, quite properly, I think, as the new Pornography of Prudence. Necrophilic in the extreme, this peculiar and degrading security smut comes not in a plain brown wrapper, but in the gay bindings of our leading publications, and has so succeeded in establishing the hubby's death as the most logical consequence of marriage that in our sample month the reader of the Ladies' Home Journal was prepared to welcome a feature on "Family Money Management" which was devoted entirely to answering letters from anxious wives who wanted to know the best way to increase their hubbies' life insurance and pay the annual premium. By means of a full-page, full-color cemetery scene, she was further invited to inspect the latest-model gray-granite tombstones offered by Rock of Ages, of Barre, Vermont. And, a few pages further on, she was given the opportunity to stop and shop for a burial vault for you know who. "Will you know what to do when you're called on?" the manufacturer inquired. "Your funeral director can explain how Wilbert Burial Vaults afford the best 'peace-of-mind' protection.... Wilbert Burial Vaults are made from heavy, reinforced concrete, fused to a thick, precast water-repellent asphalt liner, sealed by a special sealant." And, as if that weren't enough to hold even the most restless hubby for at least a hundred years, damned if Wilbert Burial Vaults weren't guaranteed against defects of workmanship by the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval!

From the editorial sepulchers of the vault-vouching, tomb-testing Good Housekeeping itself came our hubbysniping "Guide to Daddy-Bird Watching," and a wife-angled tip sheet on "Major Medical Insurance," which was illustrated by a whimsical sketch of Mrs. Consumer and her kids visiting the bedside of their hospitalized family magnate with gifts of cookies and flowers. By way of "cheers, chores and chuckles from hearth and home," Marjorie Brophy, author of Every Day Is Mother's Day, told a funny one about a mortuary-minded moppet named Stephi, who "had the following conversation with her father:

"Stephi: Are you going to die and go to heaven next year when you get old?

"Daddy: When I get old, yes, but that won't be next year.

"Stephi: When will it be?

"Daddy: Not for a long time, Stephi. Don't worry about it.

"Stephi: Well, except if you're in heaven, who's going to blow up my swimming tube?"

In the cartoon that capped this rib tickler, the Jolly Reaper had already come and taken little Stephi's daddy away, and little Stephi was standing on the beach in her little swimsuit looking up at the big sky where her funny old Daddy-Bird was flying around with angel's wings and a halo, blowing up little Stephi's swimming tube -- in heaven! And if the good housekeepers thought that was humorous, they had another corset-busting tee-hee coming. Right after the little-Stephi story, Miss Brophy offered more cheers and chuckles in the form of an italicized report on a recent survey of American men, which revealed that "66 percent of them wash the windows in their homes, 46 percent clean the drains, 27 percent wax the floors. The survey's final disclosure is a puzzler," Miss Brophy chirruped in bent letters. "Unmarried men are more likely to send anniversary greeting cards than married men. I wonder to whom?"

If she had taken time to ponder the question, Miss Brophy might have realized that unmarried men send anniversary cards to their married friends, while hubbies are required to commemorate the occasion with more substantial keepsakes. Only after a hubby has killed himself in the race against taxes, prices and grimy windows is a bachelor friend obliged to supply The Marriage with anything more than occasional felicitations. Then, and only then, does it become the single man's duty to step in and bolster his best friend's widow -- as did Calvin Burch, the craggy and competent hero of the "Great New Novel" with which Good Housekeeping led off its fiction parade.

This complete-in-one-issue saga, which bore the free-and-clear title of The Widow's Estate, was the story of a beautiful 32-year-old beneficiary named Laura Barnes, and explored "the world of a wife suddenly facing the future alone -- the decisions that must be made when she is highly vulnerable, the attempt to be both mother and father, the frightening gamble of opening a business, and finally the healing hope of finding love again ..." Since the eligible Calvin was on hand from the very first paragraph, however, the reader just knew that somehow everything was going to come up roses for the pretty little widow, and that Calvin Burch would soon be providing her with the same dependable lint-free service as her late husband, Mitch. Meanwhile, good housekeepers everywhere were able to while away an afternoon by putting themselves in Laura's smooth-fitting girdle for a vicarious bout with bereavement and small-business management, climaxed by a second fling at romantic marriage.

In the same issue of Look in which the bumbling Hubby Image was presented in the flooded-bathroom bit, and Your Independent Insurance Agent celebrated "Protection Week" with a two-page cry of doom, the Clark Grave Vault Company offered a wife's-eye view of another waterproof hubby holder that also bore the Good Housekeeping guarantee -- thus raising the interesting possibility that the chunky little monthly might go completely ghoulish at any moment, and change its name to Good Gravekeeping. Even more provocative, perhaps, was the thought that some smart publisher might steal a death march on his competitors by bringing out a new periodical, called Modern Widow -- a big, slick consumer mag like Modern Bride, that would cop the whole hubby-planting market.

Almost prophetically, the Clark Grave Vault people were already offering a booklet, called My Duty, which could easily be retitled "modern widow plans a perfect funeral" -- loaded as it is with advice on "How to select pallbearers" and "What to look for in selecting a casket." Building on this fresh-sod base, Modern Widow might add a few black-and-white spreads on the latest funeral fashions, and wend its way into a few million homes with helpfully hintful articles emphasizing the fun side of widowhood: "Choosing Your Hubby's Funeral Music," "18 Ways to Decorate a Pretty Grave," and "Headstones to Dream On." Since a well-groomed hubby-body can presumably make a widow look twice as beautiful, space might also be found for a horizontal layout on the new "Dear Departed" shrouds, designed especially for him by Fink the undertaker.

Though a new magazine devoted to the arts of living might have trouble getting started, it would seem fairly certain that Modern Widow could count upon enough death-oriented advertising to send it zooming into the mainstream of American culture like a hopped-up hearse. And if a little initial capital were needed, no group on earth is in a better position to help out than the numerous self-professed friends the American widow has in our national insurance industry, whose investment funds stand at a staggering all-time high of $160,000,000,000. In a sense, the Travelers Insurance Companies may be credited with having anticipated Modern Widow's fiction needs with its vignette concerning Laura and the red-umbrella man -- just as Good Housekeeping may be said to deserve a tall white lily for breaking ground on the financial side of widowhood with its great novel about Laura Barnes. But the big floral wreath for literary spadework must go to True Story for having made the season memorable with a widowed heroine whose name was Laurie instead of Laura, and for being so alert to the American woman's growing acceptance of the insurance man as an idealized Hubby-Daddy Image, that the male love interest was entrusted to the handsome young insurance agent who turned up one rainy day with the widow's claim check:

"I took off my hat and came inside. 'I'm Stan Graham from Acme Mutual. I have a check for you, Mrs. Mize.'

"Her smile faded and I saw the dark smudges beneath her eyes then. 'Oh, Con's insurance.' She held out her hand to take my raincoat and hang it up.

"'I'm sorry about your loss, Mrs. Mize.' Even then I thought, I could go for this girl in a big way:

"'It was an awful shock. Con had never been sick a day in his life and then in less than a week he was gone, a rare kind of virus. None of the new drugs helped.' She looked grave, but not heartbroken. I wondered.

"She led the way into the living room. I was relieved not to have a weeping widow on my hands. 'You'd better sit there by the fire and dry out. I'll make some coffee. No need to leave until this downpour lets up.'

"Suddenly, I wasn't in as much of a hurry to get back to Eureka, where I lived, as I had been," Stan-the-Policy-Man confesses. At midnight it is still raining. "You will have to stay all night," Laurie tells him. "There will be rock slides and washouts ..." Caught in a sudden deluge of mutual and providential emotion, Stan Graham and the deceased client's widow turn from the fireside, and, "as natural as breathing," she is in his arms, their "lips clinging." But then comes the promised washout as Laurie prudentially pulls away, "looking terribly upset," and hurries off to her chaste widow's bed, shutting the door behind her.

The next morning, Laurie apologizes for her brazen behavior, and Stan heads back to Eureka. "I really thought I could forget about Laurie in time," he recalls. "I sent her five pounds of chocolates and thought, Now forget all about it, Graham." But Graham couldn't forget. He was already the victim of a fatal romantic complex, and none of the old drugs helped: "I dated redheads, blondes and brunettes and it didn't help a bit. I thought of Laurie constantly." It was an awful shock. Stan had never been lovesick a day in his life, and now in less than a few pages, he's gone. The problems involved in marrying a widow with a ready-made family are manfully resolved, and the ending is a widow's dream: "Our honeymoon was one weekend at Monterey," Stan muses. "We didn't want to leave the kids long when things were going so well with me and the boys.... The kids had become important to me as individuals, not just because they belonged to Laurie.

"My bachelor days were over, and I wouldn't go back to them for anything in the world. Now I have a future, a goal to work for, an old age that will be full of family and rich memories. I'm a lucky man. I'm back working for Acme Insurance. We live in Eureka and we're saving to buy a home. I'm selling more than ever before. I want the best for my family because I love them. And that's the honest truth."

And there it was -- all worked out in a pulp magazine, in a way that the sociologist had only half-hinted. The romantic salesman had himself been sold, and the Insurance Man and Hubby were one. The widow's mite had been transformed into the widow's might, and Acme Insurance would continue to serve her in every way until death did Stan Graham take. Beyond Graham's death, even, for the hubby-daddy-policy-appliance would continue to function, and another Acme Mutual man (middle-aged, and handsomely gray) would appear at the door one rainy day to announce, "I have a check for you, Mrs. Graham." And Mrs. Graham -- a bit older, perhaps, but still very much alive -- would take the man's raincoat and murmur, "Oh, Stan's insurance."

While I trust that I shall never forcibly be made privy to the romantic truths contained in previous and future issues of True Story, that single copy was enough to summarize all that anyone might say on the present state of romantic marriage, and the size and shape of the Hubby Image. Here, presented in no-nonsense blue-collar-class terms, was a world where the cartoon hubby was chased to the top of the oil burner by an angry turkey, and the sightgag groom had to be dragged bodily to the altar. Here was a world where "The dandiest dads make Aunt Jemimas!" for the family's breakfast, and hard-hat hubbies considerately "save 75 percent" by buying secondhand work pants at 99 cents a pair -- a world where mail-order gravestones were available on "Easy Terms, as Low as $4.52 Down," and the smiling wife no longer merely leaned on the hubby-hatted Frigidaire washer, but sat square with two comfy buttocks on its sturdy lid. Appropriately, the month's "Best-Selling Book Bonus" was Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown's handbook on the karate of modern courtship, in which sex was viewed as "a powerful weapon for a single woman in getting what she wants from life," marriage defined as "insurance" for a girl's "worst years," and the American man accepted as woman's "potential slave."

To the numerous unfettered male spirits for whom sex is not a weapon but a wonderfully beneficent by-product of the peaceful uses of romantic energy, it cannot fail to appear somewhat ironical that Mrs. Brown considered single women to be "the least understood and most criticized minority group of all time." Reaching a couple of notches higher on the same newsstand, it was doubly ironical to discover, furthermore, that Harper's felt the need to run a special 63-page supplement on the "emotions, work, marriages, divorces, education, politics, and other dilemmas" of "The American Female" -- cheek by haggard jowl with a life-insurance pitch in which the upper-management male provider was once again invited to read how "cash-value insurance works for both you and your family."

In the foreword to Harper's supplement, which began on the opposite page, the reader soon gathered that there were forms of domestic disaster and human poverty from which no policy could insure protection. Despite all the advances women had made in recent decades, an extraordinary number of American females were still troubled and dissatisfied, and "the mechanized home has brought millions of women the gift (or the burden) of uncommitted hours," Harper's noted. Citing the "annual flood of female volunteers" into political, cultural and philanthropic activities as "a measure of the time American women have on their hands," the editors asked: "Since copious leisure did not arrive yesterday, why, one wonders, did American women wait so long to figure out what they should do with their lives?"

One answer -- too unflattering to the romantic image of American women to be acceptable to most modern wife watchers -- would seem to lie in the obvious fact that the job of the American wife has become much too cushy to be easily abandoned, even in the teeth of the most crushing boredom. "Whether one finds it richly rewarding or frustrating, there is one trouble with motherhood as a way of life," the hubby-scribes of Harper's sympathetically observed. "It does not last very long. Indeed the average American couple today is still in its 20s when it is through with childbearing. The wife, at this stage, has probably 40 additional years to fill up."

The correlative and considerably more appalling thought that the burdens of hubbyhood follow a man into his grave, and permit him less than 40 months of vacation during his entire lifetime, apparently occurred to no one. As in most other studies, the miseries arising from modern marriage were considered solely in terms of the American female's megrims and malaise, and were presumed to rest fully upon the shoulders of marriage's freest and most privileged victims. In an effort to solve their problem of nothing-to-do, "a mounting number of women are trying to pick up the pieces of an interrupted education," Harper's went on to say. "Others are taking jobs in offices and factories. Some are casting about for new functions within their own homes and communities. And there are those who can find no better answer than drinking too much, buying things they don't need, or moving unhappily from one bed to another.

"Whatever their solution, many are finding that the institutions that are supposed to serve women are not very helpful, and neither are many of our deeply rooted attitudes and customs."

A more flagrant and lethal lack of helpfulness must be charged against most of the institutions that are supposed to serve the American male -- and they are few indeed. As American men heroically struggle to create higher standards of living and build stronger bulwarks of security, the wailing of wives continues to demand full national attention, and all channels of communication are jammed with their strident SOSes -- "Save our Sex!" "Save our Security!" "Save our Status! ... our Self-esteem! ... our Souls! ... our Slender figures! ... our Something and Everything!" -- but seldom "our Self-sacrificing Slaves ... our Spouses!"

Obviously, the problems and pressures which marriage imposes upon the great mass of American men demand far more illumination and discussion than this one-man minority report can provide. But it would be unreasonable to suppose that even the most tolerant of men will long continue to support so fretful and suicidal a relationship. At a time when the whole institution of marriage has been brought into question by the ill-natured and excessive demands placed upon it by American women, it is only logical to expect that our younger male romantics will find bachelorhood all the more appealing, and that the American man will seek some form of male-female entente that will liberate him from the thankless and oppressive onus of having to spend the better part of his life in preparation for his own death.

Though religion and romanticism require that the solution to our conjugal inequities and discontents be found within the context of marriage as we have known it, it would be folly to assume that American men will persist in seeking answers purely in terms of greater happiness and contentment for the American female. Since masculine thoughtfulness, consideration and sacrifice have failed so notably to please her in the past, it is possible, perhaps, that a more satisfactory and humane solution might be had by approaching the problem from the standpoint of masculine self-interest. With women outnumbering men by more than two-and-a-half million, there is certainly no rational necessity for the American male to bargain from a defensive position, or to go about on bended knee in search of someone to love, honor and support. Indeed, in the final analysis, it is entirely possible that romantic marriage might be made to pay off in greater happiness for both parties if the modern bride were required to love, honor and support him.

As the sun slowly sets over my inkwell, and Harper's decries a trend toward working wives, I seem to recall a somewhat similar suggestion, made a few years back by the anthropologist-writer, Ashley Montagu, whose eloquent advocacy of greater male consideration toward American women ranks him as milady's leading male lobbyist in the world of contemporary letters. In The Natural Superiority of Women, a book dedicated to Marjorie with all his love, Mr. Montagu pointed out that, while women "have demonstrated that they can work as hard as men at almost all occupations, and that they do a great deal better at some than men ever did," American men "have resisted the 'intrusion' of women into their workaday world to the last ditch, and many are still doing it. Why? ..."

Why, indeed, gentlemen? In physiological make-up and psychological temperament the human male has long been known to be unsuited for grinding effort of any sort. For sporadic feats of strength and skill, yes. For slaying a saber-toothed tiger or writing a symphony, yes -- but not for devoting years to the manufacture of fur ear muffs or running a retail music business. Men have nothing like the endurance that women have, Mr. Montagu argues, and proves his point by inviting the reader to examine the shabby male Y chromosome through the magic microscope of prose: "It may have the shape of a comma, the merest remnant, a sad-looking affair compared to the well-upholstered other chromosomes!"

As a cheerful clincher to this triumphant observation, Mr. Montagu lists 27 maladies, "largely due to sex-linked genes," found mostly in males, including: hemophilia, day blindness, night blindness, maldevelopment of the sweat glands, double eyelashes, congenital baldness, defective tooth enamel, and nystagmus (rhythmical oscillation of the eyeballs). As might be expected, however, none of this adds up to a case for greater consideration toward the male in Mr. Montagu's book, but may be construed as a kind of pretty compliment to the ladies, whose well-upholstered chromosomes entitle them to a more active participation in all fields of endeavor.

"The work of the world has for too long been the exclusive preserve of the male," he maintains, and I, for one, must confess that I'm rather inclined to agree. Certainly, no human being who is prone to maldeveloped sweat glands and oscillating eyeballs should be forced to continue in the arduous role of a rosy late-for-bus road runner any longer than he himself wishes to do so. By virtue of having served his sentence and faithfully punctuated it with every comma-shaped chromosome in his weary body, the American hubby is clearly entitled to enjoy some of the copious leisure that burdens the American wife.

In pitching for the right of women to pursue careers after marriage, Mr. Montagu has considerately proposed a "Four-Hour Working Day for the Married," with wife and hubby each devoting half the day to his chosen occupation, and half to taking care of the home. But, in addition to requiring a radical revision of business and industrial schedules, such a plan would only half-satisfy the American woman's urge toward usefulness, and would succeed only in further stunting male growth by adding to the hubby's check list of daily household chores. Like all such proposals emanating from the ladies' side of the aisle, Mr. Montagu's suggestion must be weighed with as much caution as that of any hubby-driving Laura Legree or fawning Fink the feminist. As history will attest, the sex with the Y chromosomes is admirably capable of deciding its own destiny and formulating its own blueprints for tomorrow. The present bristles with portents of change. The last straw has already been served, and a mere tendency to hemophilia cannot be counted upon to ensure that men will continue to bleed for the plight of the American woman. Neither double eyelashes nor the blindness of night or day can obscure the glaring fact that American marriage can no longer be accepted as an estate in which the sexes shall live half-slave and half-free.

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