The Nervous Housewife | Page 3

Then man invented the machine, harnessed steam, wired electricity,
and there was born the Factory, the specialized house of industry, in
which there works no artisan, only factory hands. The home could not
compete with this man's monster, into which flowed one river of raw
material and out of which poured another of finished products. But not
only did the factory dye, weave, spin, tan, etc.; it also invaded the
innermost sphere of woman's work. For her loaf of bread it turned out
thousands, until finally she is beginning to give up baking; for her

hit-or-miss jellies, preserves, jams, it invented scientific canning with
absolute methods, handy forms, tempting flavors. And canning did not
stop there; meats, soups, vegetables, fruits are now placed in the hands
of the housewife "Ready to Serve," until the cynical now state,
"Woman is no longer a cook, she is a can opener." With all the talk in
this modern time of women invading man's field, it is just to remark
that man has stepped into woman's work and carried off a huge part of
it to his own creation, the factory.
Thus it has come to pass that in our day the housewife does but little
dyeing, spinning, weaving, is no longer a handicraftsman, and in
addition is turning over a large part of her food preparation and cooking
to the factory.
But the factory is not content with thus disarranging the ancient scheme
of things by invading the housewife's province; it has dragged a large
number of women, yearly increasing in number and proportion, into
industry. Thus it has made this condition of affairs: that it takes the
young girl from the home for the few years that intervene before her
marriage. She is thus initiated into wage-earning before she becomes a
man's wife, the housewife.
This industrial period of a girl's life is important psychologically, for it
profoundly influences her reaction to her status and work as
homekeeper.
Of even greater importance to our study than the influence of the
factory is the rise of what is known as feminism. Of all the living
creatures in the world the female of the human species has been the
most downtrodden, for to every wretched class of man there was a still
inferior, more wretched group, their wives. She was a slave to the
slaves, a dependent of the abjectly poor. When men passed through the
stage where woman's life might be taken at a whim, she remained a
creature without rights of the wider kind. Men debated whether she had
a soul, made cynical proverbs about her, called her the "weaker vessel,"
and debarred her from political and economic equality, classing her up
to this very moment in rights with the idiot, the imbecile, and the
criminal. Worse than this, they gave her a spurious homage, created a

lop-sided chivalry, and caused her to accept as her ideal goal of
womanhood the achievement of beauty and the entrance into wifehood.
After they tied her hand and foot with restrictions and belittling ideals,
they capped the climax by calling her weak and petty by nature and
even got her to believe it!
It is not my intention to trace the rise of feminism. Brave women arose
from age to age to glorify the world and their sex, and men here and
there championed them. Man started to emancipate himself from
slavery, and noble ideals of the equality of mankind first were
whispered, then shouted as battle cries, and finally chiseled with
enduring letters into the foundations of States. "But if all this was good
for men, why not for women--why should they be fettered by illiteracy,
pettiness, dependence; why should they be voiceless in the state and
world?" So asked the feminists. The factory called for women as labor;
they became the clerks, the teachers, the typists, the nurses. Medicine
and the law opened their doors, at least in part. And now we are on the
verge of universal suffrage, with women entering into the affairs of the
world, theoretically at least the equals of man.
But with the entrance of woman into many varied professions and
occupations, with a wider access to experience and knowledge, arose
what may be called the era of the "individualization of woman." For if
any group of people are kept under more or less uniform conditions in
early life, if one goal is held out as the only legitimate aim and end, in a
word, if their training and purposes are made alike, they become alike
and individuality never develops. With individuality comes rebellion at
old-established conditions, dissatisfaction, discontent, and especially if
the old ideal still remains in force. This new type of woman is not so
well fitted for the old type of marriage as her predecessors. There arises