How things do change even in a hundred years! This extract was found in a magazine of 1891:
How many a family quarrel a button missing from my lord’s shirt has caused; how many a man has found a dainty, well cooked dinner,with which his wife has really taken pains, all distateful,because she did not remember that he did not like onions in the soup, or oil in the salad!Unreasonable?Yes,and a little thing to put him out ,but who, dear madam ,finds the grain of sand in the eye less irritating because of its minutenes, and have not you yourself have all your pleasure in your new bonnet destroyed because the ostrich plumes and the ribbon wre a little different in colour? It was so little that no one but yourself probably ever noticed it, but nevertheless you hated that bonnet and felt cross when you wore it.
Men are luxurious creatures, and the wife nearest her husband’s heart is she who studies his comfort.Men may be charmed,tantalized by, infatuated with the beautiful,the witty, the cocquettish for a time, but it is the woman who keeps his hose darned ,who lays his paper on his plate ,remembers the eaxact number of lumps of sugar ,and the quantity of cream in his coffee, who avoids the subject of Jone’s success in the very undertaking he himself failed in,because she knows it is not pleasant – this is the woman who takes permanent possession of his heart, rules it through never letting him suspect she is aught but his humble handmaid, and when she dies is mourned and missed sincerely
-from a correspondent at the St Louis Globe-Democrat 1891
Of such little things a marriage was made!