1. Men and Fools
It takes one woman twenty years to make a man of her son and another woman twenty minutes to make a fool of him.
-Helen Rowland
2. Caught!
The discovery of rice-powder on his coat-lapel makes a college-boy swagger, a bachelor blush, and a married man tremble.
-Helen Rowland
3. Love is...
Love is misery sweetened with imagination, salted with tears, spiced with doubt, flavored with novelty, and swallowed with your eyes shut.
-Helen Rowland
4. Fickle Men
Somehow, the moment a man has surrendered the key of his heart to a woman, he begins to think about changing the lock.
-Helen Rowland
5 Safety First
A bachelor’s idea of “safety first” consists in getting tangled up with a lot of women in order to avoid getting tied up to one.
-Helen Rowland
6. Adam's Rib
It seems so unreasonable of man to expect a woman to think straight, walk straight, or talk straight, considering that she was made from his rib the crookedest bone in his body.
-Helen Rowland
7. Personal Liberty
If married couples would show as much respect for one another’s personal liberty, habits and preferences as they do for one another’s toothbrushes, love’s young dream would not so often turn into a nightmare. It is the Siamese twin existence they impose on themselves that drives them to distraction or destruction.
-Helen Rowland
8. Gilded Facts
Love is just a glittering illusion with which we gild the hard, cold facts of life until all the world seems bright and shining!
-Helen Rowland
9. Differences
When a woman doesn’t marry it is usually because she has never met the man with whom she could be perfectly happy; but when a man remains single it is usually because he has never met the woman without whom he could not be perfectly happy.
-Helen Rowland
10. Solomon's Alibis
Solomon was the only man who ever had six hundred and ninety-nine alibis when one of his wives detected the fragrance of another woman’s sachet on his coat lapel.
-Helen Rowland
11. Human Brakes
A man is like a motor-car which always balks on the trolley-tracks and runs at top speed down hill; a wife is the human brake that prevents him from going to destruction.
-Helen Rowland
12. Platonic Love
Plato has lured more men into matrimony than Cupid. A man can see an arrow coming and dodge it, but platonic friendship strikes him in the back.
-Helen Rowland
13. The Conjugal Pillow
He that telleth a secret unto a married man may prepare himself for a lot of free advertising; for, lo, the conjugal pillow is the root of all gossip.
-Helen Rowland
14. Metamorphosis
A grub may become a butterfly, but the man who marries a butterfly, expecting to turn her into a grub, should remember that nature never works that way.
-Helen Rowland
15. Sarcasm
Many a man who is too tenderhearted to pour salt on an oyster will pour sarcasm all over his wife’s vanity and then wonder why she always shrivels up in her shell at the sight of him.
-Helen Rowland
16. Staying Put
A man who strays for love of a woman may sometimes be reclaimed; but the man who strays for love of amusement or love or novelty will never “stay put” for any girl.
-Helen Rowland
17. Sugar and Salt
A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.
-Helen Rowland
18. Paralysis
When a man hesitates to propose to a girl he is never quite sure whether it is the fear of being “turned down” or the fear of being “taken up” which paralyzes him.
-Helen Rowland
19. Marriage in Moderation
One or two marriages, like one or two drinks, may not have any visible effect upon you. But don’t make it a custom.
-Helen Rowland
20. The Marriage Habit
A woman marries the first time, you know, for love, the second time for companionship, the third time for a support and the rest of the time just from habit.
-Helen Rowland
21. Flattery
The satisfaction in flattering a man consists in the fact that, whether you lay it on thick or thin, rough or smooth, a little of it is always bound to stick.
-Helen Rowland
22. Expectations
Pshaw! It is no more reasonable to expect a man to love you tomorrow because he loves you today, than it is to assume that the sun will be shining tomorrow because the weather is pleasant today.
-Helen Rowland
23. A Darwinism Joke
When a woman looks at a man in evening dress, she sometimes can’t help wondering why he wants to blazon his ancestry to the world by wearing a coat with a long tail to it.
-Helen Rowland
24. Deeper Emotions
The shallower a man’s love, the more it bubbles over into eloquence. When his emotions go deep, words stick in his throat, and have to be hauled out of him with a derrick.
-Helen Rowland
25. Superior Intelligence
It is difficult for a man to reconcile a girl’s absorbing interest in picture-hats, pearl powder, and Paquin models with real brains; but somehow his own enthusiasm for baseball and golf never seems to him incompatible with superior intelligence.
-Helen Rowland
Many of these epigrams are familiar to English speakers the world over. They were collected in Helen Rowland’s 1922 book, A Guide to men: Being encore reflections of a bachelor girl.
Rowland was an American journalist and humorist born in Washington D.C. in 1890. For many years she wrote a column in the New York World newspaper called Reflections of a Bachelor Girl. She is often confused with Helen Rowland (later Helene Daniels), a radio singer and recording artist of the 1930s. She died at age 60 in Nashville, North Carolina.
The Internet Archive also contains digital copies of a few of her other books and compilations including The Sayings of Mrs. Solomon; being the confessions of the seven hundredth wife as revealed to Helen Rowland, The Widow, and The Rubáiyát of a Bachelor.
The video below is a LibriVox public domain recording of the reading of A Guide to Men: Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl.
The wonderful work of archivists have preserved far more material than we usually see. Our goal here is to unearth and present some of the stuff we never saw in school.