The Nervous Housewife | Page 4

a group of consequences based psychologically on this, a fact which we
shall find of great importance later on.
Women still regard marriage as their chief goal in life, still enter homes,
still bear children, and take their husband's name. But having become
more individualized they demand more definite individual treatment
and rebel more at what they consider an infringement of their rights as

human beings. Also, and unfortunately, they still wish the right to be
whimsical, they continue to reserve for themselves the weapons of tears,
reproaches, and unreasonable demands. This has brought about the
divorce evil.
Briefly the "divorce" evil arises first from the rebellion of woman
against marital drunkenness, unfaithfulness, neglect, brutality that a
former generation of wives tolerated and even expected. Second, it
arises from a conflict between the institution of marriage which still
carries with it the chattel idea--that woman is property--and a
generation of women that does not accept this. Third, it arises from the
ill-balanced demands of women to be treated as equals and also as
irresponsible, petty, and indulged tyrants. Men are unable to adjust
themselves to the shattering of the romantic ideal, and the home
disintegrates. Though divorce is the top of the crest of marital
unhappiness, it really represents only the extreme cases, and behind it
is a huge body of quarreling and divided homes.
We shall later see that our Nervous Housewife has symptoms and pains
and aches and changes in mood and feeling that are born of the conflict
that is in part pictured by divorce. _Divorce is a manifestation of the
discontent of women, and so is the nervousness of the housewife._
There arises as a result of this individualization of woman, as a result of
increasing physiological knowledge, the hugely important fact of
restricted child bearing. The woman will no longer bear children
indiscriminately,--and the large family is soon to be a thing of the past
in America and in all the civilized world. The-woman-that-knows-how
shrinks from the long nine months of pregnancy, the agony of the birth,
and the weary restricted months of nursing. Had the woman of a past
time known how, she too would have refused to bear. In this the
housewife of to-day is seconded by her husband, for where he has
sympathy for his wife he prefers to let her decide the number of
children, and also he is impressed by the high cost of rearing them.
One gets cynical about the influence of church, patriotism, and press
when one sees how the housewife has disregarded these influences. For
all the religions preach that race suicide is a sin, all the statesmen point

out that only decadent nations restrict families, and all or nearly all the
press thunder against it. It is even against the law for a physician or
other person to instruct in the methods of birth restriction, and yet--the
birth rate steadily drops. An immigrant mother has six, eight, or ten
children and her daughter has one, two, or three, very rarely more, and
often enough none. This is true even of races close to religious teaching,
such as the Irish Catholic and the Jew.
One can well be cynical of the power of religion and teaching and law
when one finds that even the families of ministers, rabbis, editors, and
lawmakers, all of whom stand publicly for natural birth, have shown a
great reduction in their size, that has taken place in a single generation.
Is the modern woman more susceptible to the effects of
pregnancy,--less resistant to the strain of childbearing and childbirth? It
is a quite general impression amongst obstetricians that this is a fact
and also that fewer women are able to nurse their babies. If so, these
phenomena are of the highest importance to the race and likewise to the
problem of the new housewife. For we shall learn that the lowering of
energy is both a cause and symptom of her neuroses.
If then we summarize what has been thus far outlined, we find two
currents in the evolution of the housewife. First, she has yielded a large
part of her work to the factory, practically all of that part of it which is
industrial and a considerable portion of the food preparation.
Second, there has been a rise in the dignity and position of woman in
the past one hundred and fifty years which has had many results. She
has considerably widened the scope of her experience with life through
work in the factory, in the office, in the schoolhouse, and in the
professions. This has changed her attitude toward her original
occupation of housewife and is a psychological fact of great importance.
She has become more industrial and individualized, and as a result has
declined to live in unsatisfactory relations with man,