Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1917-03-29
WINDING YOUR OWN
BUSINESS BIG ART
Only Few Women Capable of
Keeping Hands Off Others Af-
fairs, Dorothy Dix Declares
BY Dorothy Dix

A man asked me the other day
what l considered the finest art in
the world.
To this promptly responded: "The
art of minding your own business. :"
and 1 added with sigh, "it's an art
that seems to be beyond the grasp
of my own SEX"
And that Is a sad, sad truth.
Women can learn anything else eX-
cept to let other people run their
own affairs. That's as much beyond
the average woman as fight to the
stars. 1t takes a woman of heroic
mould to arrive at the point of grace
when she can behold another indivi-
dual making a pie without thrusting
her finger in it.
Woman is a great original and un-
reconstructed Buttinsky. She has
always been like that. She was built
that way. And it has always been
her bane. She has broken her heart
over other peoples sorrow. She has
lain awake at night and lost sleep
over other peoples worries.
She has bankrupted herself pay
ing other peoples debts. She has
brought on nervous prostration try
ing to run other peoples lives. She
has stirred up more heart burnings
and jealousy and bitterness and strife
by not minding her own business than
have been caused by anything else in
the world.
OF course, there are men meddlers,
but they are few and far between.
The mania for interfering in other
peoples business is distinctly femi-
nine. The average man feels that
he has got about all that he can man
age with his own affairs, and trouble
enough of his own without borrow
ing his neighbor's.
The average women attends to her
business in the intervals when she
isn't worrying about why the Browns
don't send their children to the pub
lie school instead of to private one,
when Brown is only on salary, and
how the Smiths can afford new au-
tomobile this season.
And the queerest part of it all is
that by some quirk of feminine logic
this unwarfanted butting into other
peoples affairs is accounted virtue
by her instead of vice.
A woman's definition of selfishness
is an individual who attends strictly
to his own business, and who doesn't
interfere with advice when other peo-
pie are in trouble, nor prescribe on
his own hook for a sick person.
This inability to attend to her own
business and leave other people to
run theirs, without any assistance
from her, goes long way toward ex-
planning why women so often fail in
their undertakings. For instance, it
is the principal reason why so many
women break down physically. They
try to carry the universe on their
shoulders.
They could manage, we'll enough
with their own work, and bear with
sufficient fortitude their own troubles,
but when they add to that the ac-
cumulated affiictions of everybody
with whom they are acquainted, they
collapse under the burden Of woe.
1t is doubtless pity that Mrs.
Jones should be such a poor man
ager and so wasteful and extrava-
CANT. 1t is much to be regretted that
young Blank does not go to work and
support his widowed mother. 1t is
crying shame that the Gray baby
should be fed on sauerkraut and beer
instead of sterilized milk, but, after
all, the other women in the neigh
borhood are not responsible for these
affairs, and there isn't a blessed thing
they can do about them, so why
should they worry. Yet they do.
There isn't wife and mother for
blocks around who isn't wearing her
self into a frazzle over the way the
Joneses and The Blanks and the Grays
of their communities conduct their
households, and all to no purpose,
for the Joneses and the Blanks and
the Grays don't want their advice,
and won't have 1t at any price.
OF course, when there is any need
of Solomon, every woman feels
capable of speaking right up and an
swering the call, but 1t is we'll to oc-
casionally reflect that other people
are almost as capable of running
their own affairs as we would be.
This is always a surprise to us, but
1t is fact nevertheless.
There was probably never a mar
riage when everybody in the COM
munity didn't feel that they could
have made a much more judicious
selection for both parties than they
had made for themselves, yet divorce
is comparatively rare. Everyone of
us Is dead sure that we could bring
up everybody else's children much
better than they are doing it, yet
other peoples children seem to turn
out about as we'll as our own.
We women really affiict ourselves
about these matters. We are re-
duced to tears because Sallie Peters
is going to marry the man she wants
instead of the man whom we think
would suit her. We aggravate our
souls because Mrs. Perkins let's her
baby play in the back yard with the
cat instead of having it folding paper
mats at the kindergarten. If the
sympathy We lavish on people who
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