HOW TO MAKE A PREACHER’S WIFE HAPPY (For the Congregation)
RULES:
1. When the new minister and his wife arrive, before she removes her hat or unpacks the dishes, telephone her that she will be expected to teach a Sunday School class, become president of the Missionary Society, sponsor a young people’s society, and teach a training class.
2. Call her to the phone often; any trivial matter will do. Have the phone ring twenty or thirty times each day; it will keep her mind off the ironing, cooking, washing, etc.
3. Repeat loudly and often that she has not been in your home. Do not call on her yourself, but expect her to call on you within a week of her arrival.
4. Expect her to make calls with her husband. Do not consider that she has the care of a family and a home, and must cook, clean, sew, and mend just as you do, besides meet all the social obligations forced upon her as the minister’s wife.
5. When she comes to see you talk of noth-
ing but the former pastor’s wife; tell her how Mrs. Blank managed everything perfectly and make her feel that she can never live up to Mrs. Blank. Upon every occasion say, “Mrs. Blank did it this way.”
6. If the minister’s wife sings or plays, show jealousy. Criticize her for singing too often. If she plays, do the same. Tell the world that Miss Minor Key is a far better singer and pianist. If she does not sing or play, feel sorry for the minister because he married a “dumb-bell.” Tell everyone she is not “fitted” to be a minister’s wife.
7. Expect her to remember names and faces perfectly. Get peeved and stay away from the church if she doesn’t know you the second time she sees you.
8. Give five cents a week to the church, and then howl because the preacher’s wife wears the same old hat for four years.
9. If she is very friendly tell everyone she gushes. If she is shy and reserved, say that she is proud and stuck up.
10. If she has small children expect her to do a vast amount of church work. She can manage somehow.
11. Within her hearing repeat often that preachers’ children are always worse behaved than the children of other people.
12. If she is not well say it is all “put on”; that she does not want to do church work.
13. Send your children over to spend five days a week. Get peeved if she sends them home. Send them over when she has company. Allow them to stay for meals. Permit them to look in all the closets and dresser drawers and cedar chests and cabinets.
14. Talk about all the church members; if possible, go over the first week and tell her all the scandal and gossip for the last fifty years, and do not leave out the up-to-date news.
15. Berate the former pastor and his wife.
16. Insist on her entertaining all visiting preachers and workers. Never do any of this yourself.
17. Insist on her coming to Ladies’ Aid and quilting one day each week. There you can tell her so many helpful things; that it is extravagant to buy ready-made dresses; that her husband’s sermons are too long or too short; that he should be a better mixer; that you do not like the way she fixes her hair, etc. She will love this.
18. Invite her to all the class meetings, put her on all programs and make her a member of all committees; have her to train the children for all special programs, then Ask Her What She Does With Her Spare Time.
19. Make remarks about her new clothes. Tell her she has too many new dresses and you do not see how she does it on her husband’s salary.
20. Use the parsonage for a public waiting and rest room. Have all music rehearsals there and never bother to ask permission. Take your children over there to spank them and to change their diapers during church services. Run in without knocking until the pastor becomes nervous every time he changes his pants or is taking a bath.
21. Then buy her a nice white lily. By this time she will be perfectly happy, having entered into the joys of the Kingdom and attained her heavenly reward.
22. Obtain a beautiful stone. On it engrave: “She hath done what she could—and what she couldn’t killed her.”
Posted in CHAPTER TEN
You may try to persuade yourself that this is an ordinary book — in order that you may find comfort in the persuasion - but you cannot do so and be fair to facts.