THE NERVOUS HOUSEWIFE
BY
ABRAHAM MYERSON, M.D.
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1920
Published November, 1920
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J.S. Cushing Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I INTRODUCTORY 1
II THE NATURE OF "NERVOUSNESS" 17
III TYPES OF HOUSEWIFE PREDISPOSED TO NERVOUSNESS 46
IV THE HOUSEWORK AND THE HOME AS FACTORS IN THE NEUROSIS 74
V REACTION TO THE DISAGREEABLE 91
VI POVERTY AND ITS PSYCHICAL RESULTS 116
VII THE HOUSEWIFE AND HER HUSBAND 126
VIII THE HOUSEWIFE AND HER HOUSEHOLD CONFLICTS 141
IX THE SYMPTOMS AS WEAPONS AGAINST THE HUSBAND 160
X HISTORIES OF SOME SEVERE CASES 168
XI OTHER TYPICAL CASES 199
XII TREATMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL CASES 231
XIII THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, THE HOME, AND MARRIAGE 244
INDEX 269
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
How old is the problem of the Nervous Housewife?
Did the semi-mythical Cave Man (who is perhaps only a pseudo-scientific
creation) on his return from a prehistoric hunt find his leafy spouse
all in tears over her staglocythic house-cleaning, or the conduct of the
youngest cave child? Did she complain of her back, did she have a
headache every time they disagreed, did she fuss and fret until he lost
his patience and dashed madly out to the Cave Man's Refuge?
We cannot tell; we only know that all humor aside, and without reference
to the past, the Nervous Housewife is surely a phenomenon of the
present-day American home. In greater or less degree she is in every
man's home; nor is she alone the rich Housewife with too little to do,
for though riches do not protect, poverty predisposes, and the poor
Housewife is far more frequently the victim of this disease of
occupation. Every practicing physician, every hospital clinic, finds her
a problem, evoking pity, concern, exasperation, and despair. She goes
from specialist to specialist,--orthopedic surgeon, gynecologist, X-ray
man, neurologist. By the time she has completed a course of treatment
she has tasted all the drugs in the pharmacopeia, wears plates on her
feet, spectacles on her nose, has had her teeth tinkered with, and her
insides straightened; has had a course in hydrotherapeutics,
electrotherapeutics, osteopathy, and Christian Science!
Such is an extreme case; the minor cases pass through life burdened with
pains and aches of the body and soul. And one of the commonest and
saddest of transformations is the change of the gay, laughing young
girl, radiant with love and all aglow at the thought of union with her
man, into the housewife of a decade,--complaining, fatigued, and
disillusioned. Bound to her husband by the ties the years and the
children have brought, there is a wall of misunderstanding between them.
"Men don't understand," cries she. "Women are unreasonable," says he.
What are the causes of the change? Did the housewife of a past
generation go through the same stage? Ask any man you meet and he will
tell you his mother is or was more enduring than his wife. "She bore
three times as many children; she did all her own housework; she baked
more, cooked more, sewed more; she got up at five o'clock in the morning
and went to bed at ten at night; she never went out, never had a
vacation, did not know the meaning of manicure, pedicure, coiffure. She
was contented, never extravagant, and rarely sick."
So the average man will say, and then: "Those were the good old days of
simple living, gone like the dodo!" To-day,--well, it reminds me of a
joke I heard. One man meets another and says: 'By the way, I heard that
your wife was the champion athlete at college.' 'Ah, yes,' said the
husband; 'now she is too weak to wash the dishes.'
Is the average man's impression the correct one? Or are we dealing with
the incorrigible disposition of man to glorify the past? To the majority
of people their youth was an era of stronger, braver men, more
wholesome, beautiful women. People were better, times were more natural,
and there is a grim satisfaction in predicting that the "world is going
to the dogs." "The good old days" has been the cry of man from the very
earliest times.
Yet read what a contemporary of the housewife of three quarters of a
century ago says,--the wisest, wittiest, sanest doctor of the day,
Oliver Wendell Holmes. The genial autocrat of the breakfast table
observes: "Talk about military duty! What is that to the warfare of a
married maid of all work, with the title of mistress and an American
female constitution which collapses just in the middle third of life,
comes out vulcanized India rubber, if it happens to live through the
period when health and strength are most wanted?"
And then, if one looks in the advertisements of half a century ago, one
finds the nostrum dealer loudly proclaiming his capacity to cure what
is evidently the Nervous Housewife. In America at least she has always
existed, perhaps in lesser numbers than at present. And one remembers in
a dim sort of way that the married woman of olden days was altogether
faded at thirty-five, that she entered on middle life at a time when at
least many of our women of to-day still think themselves young.
It becomes interesting and necessary at this point to trace the
evolution of the home, because this is to trace the evolution of our
housewife. We are apt to think of the home as originating in a sort of
cave, where the little unit--the Man, the Woman, and the Children--dwelt
in isolation, ever on the watch against marauders, either animal or
human. In this cave the woman was the chattel of man; he had seized her
by force and ruled by force.
Perhaps there was such a stage, but much more likely the home was a
communal residence, where the man-herd, the group, the clan, the Family
in the larger sense dwelt. Only a large group would be safe, and the
strong social instinct, the herd feeling, was the basis of the home.
Here the men and women dwelt in a promiscuity that through the ages
went through an evolution which finally became the father-controlled
monogamy of to-day. Here the women lived; here they span, sewed, built;
here they started the arts, the handicrafts, and the religions. And from
here the men went forth to fish and hunt and fight, grim males to whom a
maiden was a thing to court and a wife a thing to enslave.
Just how the home became more and more segregated and the family life
more individualized is not in the province of this book to detail. This
is certain: that the home was not only a place where man and woman
mated, where their children were born and reared, where food was
prepared and cooked, and where shelter from the elements was obtained;
it was also the first great workshop, where all the manifold industries
had their inception and early development. The housewife was then not
only mother, wife, cook, and nurse; she was the spinner, the weaver, the
tanner, the dyer, the brewer, the druggist.
Even in the high civilization of the Jews this wide scope of the
housewife prevailed. Read what the wisest, perhaps because most
married, of men says:
She seeketh wool and flax,
And worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchant ships;
She bringeth her food from afar.
She considereth a field, and buyeth it.
With the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.
She girdeth her loins with strength,
And maketh strong her arms.
She perceiveth that her merchandise is good.
Her lamp goeth not out by night.
She layeth her hands to the distaff
And her hands hold the spindle.
* * * * *
She is not afraid of the snow for her household:
For all her household are clothed with scarlet.
She maketh for herself coverlets,
She maketh linen garments and selleth them,
And delivereth girdles unto the merchants.
No wonder "her children rise up and call her blessed" and it is somewhat
condescending of her husband when he "praiseth her." All we learn of him
is that he "is known in the gates when he sitteth among the elders of
the land." With a wife like her, this was all he had to do.
This combination of industrialism and domesticity continued until
gradually men stepped into the field of work, perhaps as a result of
their wives' example, and became farmers on a larger scale, merchants of
a wider scope, artisans, handicraftsmen, guild members of a more
developed technique. Woman started these things in the home or near it;
man, through his restless energy, specialized and thus developed an
intenser civilization. But even up till the nineteenth century woman
carried on all her occupations at the home, which still continued to be
workshop and hearth.
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 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, so that divorce
has become more frequent. In part this is also caused by her inability
to give up petty irresponsibility while claiming equality. Finally, the
declining birth rate is still further evidence of her individualization
and is in a sense her denial of mere femaleness and an affirmation of
freedom.