The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1921-09-29
Dorothy Dix TALKS
By DOROTHY DIX
Worries highest Paid Woman Writer,
Passing the Buck.


The favorite indoor sport of most
people is passing the buck. Which
means letting George do it. Ducking
your own responsibility. Putting up
to somebody else the disagreeabIe
thing you are too lazy and too cow
ardly to do yourself.
Everybody does it, men as well as
women, but it is vice to which
women are especially addicted.
The chief reason that women get
married is because they want some
body to whom they have a legal right
to pass the buck, and they work the
privilege for all it is worth. AS long
as things are going nicely and smooth
~ and breaking as she wants them to
happen, woman takes no more ac-
count of her husbands authority as
head of the house than she does of
the ukases of the Emperor of Tim
bucktoo, and she is Just about as
much afraid of him as she is of her
pet Pomeranian.
She knows him for a meek. down.
trodden, hen-pecked creature who
wipes his feet on the doormat before
he comes into the house, and whose
only official function in the home is
signing cheeks on the dotted line
Nevertheless, when the need comes
Wlte turns him into the great and
pulSSant receiver of the buck
Ask any woman to do anything she
doesn't want to do, and she pulls a
Vlrtuous face, and says that her hus-
band will not permit her to do it. Ask
woman to contribute to a charity or
lend you money, and she will COO and
gurgle over you and tell YOU how she
would just love to do it, but that she
will have to ask her husband about it.
MRS. Jones assures you that she simply
pines to take an active part in some
great movement, but that her husband
forbids it. Mrs. Smith tells you how
she would love to have poor old Aunt
Susie live with her, even if she is so
grabbed and hard to get along with,
but her husband simply won't hear
of it. Mrs. ThomsoA doesn't feel it
right for her to spend her summer in
the mountains and her winters in
Florida, but her husband insists
upon it.
And you smile at the adroitness of
the gentle buck passers, and reflect
how strange it is that husbands
authority never interferes with the
things that women desire to do.
1t is because women pass the buck
school teachers that the land is filled
with children that make one feel that
Herod has never gotten a Just appre-
| citation from history.
1t is common thing nowadays to
hear women complain that their Ia,
OF 10, OF 1o-year-Old children are en-
tirely beyond their control The BOYS
are hoodiums. The girls are painted
UP little Jezebels who roam the streets
ana go with companions of whom
their parents do not approve, and they
come anc go at what hours they like.
It's because mothers pass the buck
When Maud and Johnny were tiny
tots and howled for whatever they
wanted until they got it, instead of
turning them across her knee, and
lifting them up to the higher life by
means of an old slipper, or a bed Stat,
or anything that was handy, mother
threatened them that she would tell
father and have him discipline them
when he got home.
But by the time father got home
she had forgotten the offense, or
father was tired and didn't want to
| be worried by an unpleasant scene.
and the result was that Maud and
Johnny went seot-free, and were con-
firmed in their opinion that the way
TO get what you want is to yell for it.