Making People Happy
Cicily Hamilton is twenty, a year into marriage, and running out of things to do. Her husband Charles has a box factory downtown, a trust trying to swallow it, and no attention left over for her once the honeymoon fades. So she gathers a dozen friends into the Civitas Society for the Uplift of Woman and for Encouraging the Spread of Social Equality among the Masses, takes the chair herself, and discovers nobody there knows how to run a meeting. Then an offhand remark from her aunt about making other people happy gives her something to aim at, and she aims it at the factory. Charles tells her to keep out of the strike. She takes off her wedding ring instead. Buchanan published this New York comedy in 1911, and its joke has teeth: the wife is right.
