TYPES OF HOUSEWIFE PREDISPOSED TO NERVOUSNESS
There are three main factors in the production of the nervousness of the
housewife, and they weave and interweave in a very complex way to
produce a variety of results. All the things of life, no matter how
simple in appearance, are a complex combination of action and reaction.
Our housewife's symptoms are no exception, whether they are mainly
pains, aches, and fatigue, or the deeply motivated doubt or feeling of
unreality.
The nature of the housewife, the conditions of her life, and her
relations to her husband are these three factors. All enter into each
case, though in some only one may be emphasized as of importance. There
are cases where the nature of the woman is mainly the essential cause,
others where it is the conditions of her life, and still others where
the husband stands out as the source of her symptoms.
We are now to consider the nature of the housewife as our first factor.
We may preamble this by saying that a woman essentially normal in one
relationship in life may be abnormal in some other, may be the
traditional square peg in the round hole. Moreover, we are to insist on
the essential and increasing individuality of women, which is to a large
extent a recent phenomenon. The cynical commonplace is "All women are
alike"--and then follows the specific accusation--"in fickleness", "in
extravagance", "in unreasonableness", in this trick or that. The chief
effort of conservatism is to make them alike, to fit each one for the
same life by the same training in habits, knowledge, abilities, and
ideals.
Talk about Prussianism! The great Prussianism, with its ideal of
uniformity, serviceability, and servility, has been the masculine ideal
of woman's life. Man was to be diversified as life itself, was to taste
all its experiences, but woman had her sphere, which belied all
mathematics by being a narrow groove.
The nineteenth century changed all that,--or started the change which
is going on with extraordinary rapidity in the twentieth. There are all
kinds of women, at least potentially. It may be true that woman
tends less to vary than man, that she follows a conservative
middle-of-the-road biologically, while man spreads out, but no one can
be sure of this until woman's early training to some extent resembles
man's.
1. From the very start woman is trained to vanity. Every mother loves to
doll up her girl baby, and the child is admired for her dress and
appearance. Now it is an essential quality of the normal human being
that he accepts as an ideal the quality most admired. To the young
child, the girl, the young woman, the important thing is Looks, Looks,
Looks! The first question asked about a woman is, "Is she pretty?" The
pretty girls, the ones most courted, the ones surest on the whole to get
married and to become housewives are usually spoiled by indulgence,
petting, admiration, and this for a quality not at all related to strong
character, and therefore vanity of a trivial kind results.
2. Moreover, woman is trained to emotionality. It may be that she is by
nature more emotional than man, but again this can only be known when
she has been trained to repress emotional response as a man is trained.
If a boy cries or shows fear, he is scolded, and training of one kind or
another is instituted to bring about moral and mental hardihood. But if
a girl cries, she is consoled by some means and taught that tears are
potent weapons, a fact she uses with extraordinary effect later on,
especially in dealing with men. If she shows fear, she is protected,
sheltered, and given a sort of indulged inferiority.
3. The romantic ideal is constantly held before her in the private
counsel of her mother, in the books she reads, in the plays she
witnesses, in all the allurements of art. She is to await the lover, the
hero; he will take her off with him to dwell in love and happiness
forever. All stories, or most of them, end before the heroine develops
the neurosis of the housewife. In fact, literature is the worst possible
preparation for married life, excepting perhaps the _courtship_. This
latter emphasizes a distorted chivalry that makes of woman a petty thing
on a pedestal, out of touch with reality; it is an exciting entrance
into what in the majority of cases is a rather monotonous existence.
All these things--vanity, emotionality, romanticism, courtship--are poor
training for the home. They hinder even the strongest woman, they are
fetters for the more delicate.
In taking up the special types predisposed to the nervousness of the
housewife it is to be emphasized that conditions may bring about the
neurosis in the normal housewife. Nevertheless, there are groups of
women who, because of their make-up or constitution, acquire the
neurosis much more easily and much more intensely than do the normal
women. They are the types most commonly seen in the hospital clinic or
in the private consulting room of the neurologist.
First comes the hyperæsthetic type. One of the chief marks of advancing
civilization is an increasing refinement of taste and desire. The
fundamental human needs are food, shelter, clothes, sex relations, and
companionship. These the savage has as well as his civilized brother,
and he finds them not only necessary but agreeable. What we call
progress improves the food and the shelter, modifies the clothes,
elaborates the sex relations and the code governing companionship. With
each step forward the cruder methods become more actively disagreeable,
and only the refined methods prove agreeable. In other words, desire
keeps pace with improvement, so that although great advances materially
have been made, there has been little advance, if any, in contentment.
This is because as we progress in refinement little things come to be
important, manner becomes more essential than matter, and we get to the
hyperæsthetic stage.
Thus the dinner becomes less important than the manner of serving it. In
the "highest circles" it is the _savoir faire_, the niceties of conduct,
that count more than character. Words become the means of playing with
thought rather than the means of expressing it, and thought itself
scorns the elemental and fundamental and busies itself with the vagaries
of existence.
From another angle, to the hyperæsthetic more and more things have
become disagreeable. To the man of simple tastes and simple feelings,
only the calamities are disagreeable; to the hyperæsthetic every breeze
has a sting, and life is full of pin pricks. "The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune" are multiplied in number, and furthermore the
reaction to them is intensified. In the "Arabian Nights" the princess
boasts that a rose petal bruises her skin, while her competitor in
delicacy is made ill by a fiber of cotton in her silken garments. So
with the hyperæsthetic; an unintentional overlooking is reacted to as a
deadly insult; the thwarting of any desire robs life of its savor;
sounds become noises; a bit of litter, dirt; a little reality,
intolerable crudity.
A woman with this temperament is a poor candidate for matrimony unless
there goes with it a capacity for adjustment, unusual in this type. Most
men have their habitual crudities, their daily lapses, and every home is
the theater of a constant struggle with the disagreeable. Intensely
pleased by the utmost refinements, these are too uncommon to make up for
the shortcomings. The hyperæsthetic woman is constantly the prey of the
most deënergizing of emotions,--disgust. "It makes me sick" is not an
exaggerated expression of her feeling. And her afflicted household size
up the situation with the brief analysis, "Everything makes her
nervous." Every one in her household falls under the tyranny of her
disposition, mingling their concern with exasperation, their pity with a
silent almost subconscious contempt.
Next comes the over-conscientious type. Whatever conscience is, whether
implanted by God, or the social code sanctified by training, teaching,
and a social nature, there can be no question that, as the Court of
Appeals, it does harm as well as good.
There are people whose lack of conscience is back of all manner of
crimes, from murder down to careless, slack work; whose cruelty, lust,
and selfishness operate unhampered by restraint. On the other hand there
are others whose hypertrophied conscience works in one of two
directions. If they are zealots, convinced of the righteousness of their
own decisions and conclusions, their conscience spurs them on to
reforming the world. Since they are more often wrong than right, they
become, as it were, a sort of misdirected Providence, raising havoc with
the happiness and comfort of others. Whether the conscienceless or
those overburdened with this type of conscience have done more harm in
the world is perhaps an open question, which I leave to the historians
for settlement.
The other type of the overconscientious does definite harm to
themselves. This type I have called the "Seekers of Perfection" and it
is their affliction that they are miserable with anything less. They are
particularly hard on themselves, differing in this wise from the by
hyperæsthetic. Constantly they examine and reëxamine what they have
done. "Is it the best I can do?" "Should I rest now; have I the right to
rest?"
Into every moment of enjoyment they obtrude conscience, or rather
conscience obtrudes itself. They become wedded to a purpose, and then
that purpose becomes a tyrant allowing no escape, even for a brief
pleasure, from its chains. Nothing is right that wastes any time;
nothing is good but the best. The sense of humor is conspicuously
lacking in this type, for one of the main functions of humor is to
season effort and straining purpose with proportion.
Should one of these unfortunates be a housewife, then she is continually
"picking up", continually pursuing that household Will-o'-the-Wisp,
"finishing the work." For it is the nature of housework that it is never
finished, no matter how much is done. This overconscientious person,
unless she is made of steel springs and resilient rubber, breathlessly
chasing this phantom all day and into the night, gives way under the
strain, even though she have a dozen servants to help. For to this type
each helper is not at all an aid. At once up goes the standard of what
is to be done, and each servant becomes an added care, an added
responsibility.
"I'd love to go out with you," wails this housewife, "but there's
something I must finish to-day." The word _must_, self-imposed, becomes
the mania of her life, to the open rebellion of her household. The word
drives her to the real neglect of her husband, who becomes irritated at
her constant and to him needless activity, coupled with her complaints.
"Why don't you rest if you are tired," is his stock remonstrance; "the
house looks all right to me."
But it is futile. She becomes irritated, perhaps cries and says, "Just
like a man. It's clean to you if there are no cobwebs on the walls."
Whereupon the debate closes, but the woman is the more deënergized and
the man exasperated at the unreasonableness of women in general and his
wife in particular.
It is probably true that woman has more conscience, in so far as detail
is concerned, than man. She is more of a lover of order and neatness,
more wedded to decorum. Man loves comfort and his interest is more
specialized and analytical, and as a rule he hates fussiness.
This hatred of fussiness makes him long for the masculine clubroom,
gives him the kind of uneasiness that sends him off on a fishing trip or
hunting expedition. Further, and this is of great social importance,
many a broken home, many an unexplainable triangle of the Wife, the
Husband, and the Other Woman owes its existence, not to the charms of
the other woman, but to the overconscientious wife.
The third type predisposed to the neurosis of the housewife is the
overemotional woman.
We have already considered the effect of certain types of emotion on
health and endurance and may formulate it as follows: Emotion may act
as a great bodily disturbance, affecting every organ and every function
of the body. What we call nervousness is largely made up of abnormal
emotional response, of persistent emotion, of the blocking of energy by
emotion.
Now people differ from the very start of life in their response to
situations. One baby, if he does not get what he wants, turns his
attention to something else, and another will cry for hours or until he
gets it. One will manifest anger and strike at being blocked or impeded
in his desires, and the other will implore and plead in a baby way for
his wish.
In the face of difficulties one man shows fear and worry, another acts
hastily and without premeditation, a third flares up in what we call a
fighting spirit and seeks to batter down the resistance, and still a
fourth becomes very active mentally, calling upon all of his past
experience and seeking a definite plan to gain his end.
A loss, a deprivation, plunges one type of person into deepest sorrow, a
helpless sorrow, inert and symbolic of the hopeless frustration of
love. The same affliction striking at another man's heart makes him
deeply and soberly reflective, and out of it there ensues a great
philanthropy, a great memorial to his grief. For the one, sorrow has
deënergized; for the other it has energized, has raised the efforts to a
nobler plane.
Now there are women, and also men, to whom emotion acts like an overdose
of a drug. Parenthetically, emotion and certain drugs have very similar
effects. No matter how joyous the occasion and how exuberant their joy,
a mood may settle into their lives like a fog and obscure everything.
This mood may arise from the smallest disappointment; or a sudden vision
of possible disaster to one they love may appear before them through
some stray mental association. They are at the mercy of every sad memory
and of every look into the future.
Preëminently, they are the victims of that form of chronic fear called
worry, more aptly named by Fletcher "fearthought." He implied by this
name that it was a sort of degenerated "forethought."
If the baby has a cough, then it may have tuberculosis or pneumonia or
some disastrous illness, of which death is the commonest ending. How
often is the doctor called in by these women and needlessly, and how she
does keep his telephone busy! It is true that a cough may be early
tuberculosis, but this is the last possibility rather than the first.
If the husband is late, Heaven knows what may have happened. She has
visions of him lying dead in some morgue, picked up by the police, or
he's in a hospital terribly injured by an automobile, or, perchance, a
robber has sandbagged him and dragged him into a dark alley. If she is a
bit jealous, and he is at all attractive, then the disaster lies that
way. It doesn't matter that his work may be such that he cannot be at
home regularly or on schedule; the sinister explanation takes possession
of her to the exclusion of the more rational; _she has a sort of
affinity for the terrible_. And when her husband comes home, the
profound fear in many cases turns sharply and quickly to anger at him.
Her distorted sense of responsibility makes him the culprit for her
unnecessary fear.
Now it is true that almost every woman has something of this tendency,
but it is only the extreme case that I am here depicting. In this
extreme form, this type of woman is commonly found among the Jews. The
Jewish home reverberates with emotionality and largely through this
attitude of the Jewish housewife.
Such a woman is apt to make a slave of her family through their fear of
arousing her emotions. How frequently people are chained by their
sympathies, how frequently they are impeded in enjoyment by the tyranny
of some one else's weakness, would fill one of the biggest chapters in a
true history of the human race,--a book that will probably never be
written.
Naturally enough, this housewife finds plenty to worry about, to react
to, and since these reactions are physical, they have a lowering effect
on her energy.
To those familiar with the conception that every emotion, every feeling,
needs a discharge, it will seem heretical when I say that the excessive
discharge of emotion is harmful. Freud finds the root of most nervous
trouble in repressed emotion. That is in part true, but it is also true
that excessive emotionality is a high-grade injury, for emotional
discharge is habit forming. It becomes habitual to cry too much, to act
too angry, to fear too much. The conquest and disciplining of emotion is
one of the great objects of training. It has for its goal the supremacy
of the noblest organ of the human being, his brain. For proper living
there must be emotion--there always will be--but it must be tempered
with intelligence if the best good of the individual and the race is to
be reached.
The type of woman we must now study is a very modern product, the
non-domestic type.
That the great majority of women have a maternal instinct does not
nullify the fact that a small number have none whatever. One of the
facts of life, not taken into account with a fraction of its true
significance and importance, is the variability of the race, the wide
range of abilities, instincts, emotions, aspirations, and tastes. A
quality is said to be normal when the majority of the group possess it,
but it may be utterly lacking in a smaller number who are thereby
declared abnormal.
At present, it is normal for woman to be domestic, _i.e._ to yearn for
husband, home, and children; to want to be a housewife. Unfortunately,
all these yearnings do not hang closely together, and a woman may want a
husband and be swept by her own desire and opportunity into matrimony,
and yet she may "detest" children, may dislike the housekeeping
activities of marriage. The sex and other instincts upon which marriage
is based are not always linked with the maternal and home-keeping
instincts.
While this has probably always been true, it mattered little in olden
days. A woman regarded the home as her destiny and generally had
experienced no other life. But as was shown in the first chapter,
industry and feminism have given woman a taste of other kinds of life
and have developed her individual points of character and abilities.
Perhaps she has been the bookkeeper of a large concern; or the private
secretary to a man of exciting affairs; or she has been the buyer for
some house; or she has dabbled in art or literature; or she has been a
factory girl mingling with hundreds of others, working hard, but in a
large group; or a saleslady in a department store,--and domestic life is
expected of her as if she had been trained for it. In fact, she has been
trained away from it.
The novelists delight to tell us of the woman who seeks a career and
enters the struggle of her profession and fails. And then there comes,
just when her failure is greatest and she is most weepingly feminine,
the patient hero, and he holds out his arms, and she slips into them,
oh, so joyously! She now has a home, and will be happy--long row of
asterisks, and have children; and if it is a movie, a year or more
elapses and we are permitted to gaze upon a charming domestic scene.
But alas for reel life as against real life! We are not shown how she
yearns for the activities of her old career; we are not shown the
feeling she constantly has that she is too good for housekeeping. If she
has been fortunate enough to marry a rich and indulgent man, she becomes
a dilettante in her work, playing with art or science. If her first
vocation was business, she is bored to death by domesticity. But if she
marries poverty, she looks on herself as a drudge, and though loyalty
and pride may keep her from voicing her regrets, they eat like a canker
worm in the bud,--and we have the neurosis of this type of housewife. Or
else her experience in business makes her size up her husband more
keenly, and we find her rebelling against his failure, criticizing him
either openly to the point of domestic disharmony, or inwardly to her
own disgust.
It is not meant that all business and professional women, all typists
and factory girls are dissatisfied with marriage or develop an abnormal
amount of neurosis. Many a girl of this type really loves housekeeping,
really loves children, and makes the ideal housewife. Intelligent,
clear-eyed, she manages her home like a business. But if independent
experience and a non-domestic nature happen to reside in the same woman,
then the neurosis appears in full bloom. Against the adulation given to
women singers and actresses, against the fancied rewards of literature
and business, the domestic lot seems drab to this non-domestic type.
Here the question arises: Is there room in our society for matrimony and
a business career? That a large number of exceptional women have found
it possible to be mothers, housewives, authors, and singers at one and
the same time does not take away from the fact that in the majority of
cases such a combination means either a childless marriage or the
turning over of an occasional child to servants: it means the
abandonment of the home and the living in hotels, except in the few
cases where there is wealth and trusty servants. Wherever women who have
children are poor and work in factories, there is the greatest infant
mortality, there is the greatest amount of juvenile delinquency, and
there is the greatest amount of marital difficulty. Our present
conception of matrimony demands that woman remains in the home until
such time at least as her children are able to care largely for
themselves.
In the history of the worst cases of the housewife's neurosis one finds
previously existing trouble, though, as I have before this emphasized,
the neurosis may develop in the previously normal. This previously
existing trouble is the "nervous breakdown" in high school or in
college, or in the factory and the office, though it must be said it
occurs relatively less often in the latter places than the former. This
previous breakdown often appears as the direct result from emotional
strain such as an unhappy love affair, or the fear of failure in
examinations. It may have followed acute illness, like influenza or
pneumonia. But the original temperament was nervous, high-strung,
delicate; one learns of an appetite that disappeared easily, a sleep
readily disturbed, in short, an easily lowered or obstructed output of
energy.
This type of woman, neurotic from her very birth, is often the very best
product of our civilization from the standpoint of character and
ability, just as the male neurasthenic is often the backbone of progress
and advancement. But we are concerned with these questions: "What
happens to her in marriage?" "How about her fitness for marriage?"
As to the first question, we may say that all depends on whom and how
she marries. For after all a woman does not marry _matrimony_, she
marries a _man_, a home, and generally children. And if the neurotic
woman marries a devoted, kindly, conscientious man with wealth enough to
give her servants in the household and variety in her experiences, she
is as reasonably well off as could be expected. She is no worse off than
if she had remained single and continued to be a school teacher, social
worker, typist, factory hand the rest of her days,--and she has
fulfilled more of her desires and functions. But if she marries an
unsympathetic, impatient man or a poor one, or a combination, then the
first child brings a breakdown that persists, with now and then short
periods of betterment, for many years. Then we have the chronic invalid,
the despair of a household, the puzzle of the doctors. "Not really
sick," say the latter to the discouraged husband, seeking to adjust
himself to his wife, "only neurasthenic. All the organs are O.K." To
differentiate between a lowered energy and imaginary illness or laziness
is a hard task to which this husband is usually unequal. Though some
show of duty and kindness remains, love dies in such a household. And
the very effort to give sympathy where doubt exists as to the
genuineness of the affliction is painful and increases the chasm between
wife and husband.
That some of the sweetest marriages result where the wife is of this
type does not change the general situation that such a marriage is an
increased risk. Should a man knowingly marry such a woman? The question
is futile in the overwhelming majority of cases. He will marry her, is
the answer. For the fascinating woman is frequently of this type.
Witness the charm of the neuropathic eye with its widely dilated pupil
that changes with each emotion, the mobile face,--delicate, with a play
of color, red and white, that is charming to look at, but which the grim
physician calls "Vasomotor instability." There is nothing neutral about
this type; she is either very lovely or a freak.
So all advice in the matter is of little avail. And racially speaking it
is good that it is of no avail. I believe firmly that such a woman is
more often the mother of high ability than her more placid sister; that
something of the delicacy of feeling and intensity of reaction of
neurasthenia is a condition of genius. We are too far away from any real
knowledge of heredity to advise for or against marriage in the most of
cases on this basis, and certainly we must not repeat Lombroso and
Nordau's errors and call all variations from stupidity degeneration.
But this does not change the domestic situation of the man who is
usually much more concerned with his own comfort than the mathematical
possibilities of his offspring being geniuses. Certainly such a woman
as the type now considered is not a poor man's wife, for she really
needs what only the rich can have,--servants, variety, frequent
vacations, and freedom from worry. Now worry cannot be shut out of even
the richest home, for illness, old age, and death are grim visitors who
ask no man's leave. But poverty and its worries are kept away by wealth,
and poverty is perhaps the most persistent tormentor of man.
Essential in the study of "nervousness" is the physical examination, and
we here pass to the physically ill housewife.
It is important to remember that the diagnosis of neurasthenia is,
properly speaking, what is called by physicians a diagnosis of
exclusion. That is to say, after one has excluded all possible illnesses
that give rise to symptoms like neurasthenia, then and then only is the
diagnosis justified. That is, a woman physically ill, with heart, lung,
or kidney disease, or with derangements of the sexual organs, may act
precisely like a nervous housewife,--may have pains and aches, changes
in mood, loss of control of emotion; in a word may be deënergized.
It is not often enough remembered that bearing children, though a
natural process, is hazardous, not only in its immediate dangers but to
the future health of the woman. Injuries to the internal and external
parts occur with almost every first birth, especially if that birth
occurs after twenty-five years of age. Repair of the parts immediately
is indicated, but in what percentage of cases is this done? In a very
small percentage of cases, I venture to state, not only in my own small
experience in this work, but on the statements of men of large
experience and high authority.
In this connection I may state that the leading obstetricians believe
that the woman of to-day has a harder time in labor than her
predecessors. Aside from the more or less mythical stories of the savage
women who deliver themselves on the march, there seems to be no
reasonable doubt that in an increasing civilization and feminization,
woman becomes less able to deliver herself, especially at the first
birth.
Why is this? After all, it is a fundamental matter. And moreover it is
more often the tennis-playing, horseback-riding, athletic girl who
falls short in this respect than the soft-limbed, shrinking,
old-fashioned girl. Does a strenuous existence make against easy
motherhood? It would seem so; it would seem the more masculine the
occupations of woman become, the less able are they to carry out the
truly female functions. But this is a digression from our point.
A retroverted uterus, a lacerated perineum, such minor difficulties as
flat feet, such major ones as valvular disease of the heart, are causes
of ill health to be ruled out before "nervousness" (or its medical
equivalents) is to be diagnosed.
It is superfluous to say that we have here briefly considered only a few
of the types specially predisposed to difficulty. Moreover men and women
do not readily fall into "types." A woman may be hyperæsthetic in one
sphere of her tastes and as thick-skinned as a rhinoceros in others. She
may squirm with horror if her husband snores in his sleep, but be
willing to live in an ugly modern apartment house with a poodle dog for
her chief associate. Or the overconscientious woman may expend her
energies in chasing the last bit of dirt out of her house but be
willing to poison her family with three delicatessen meals a day. The
overemotional housewife may flood the household with her tears over
trifles but be a very Spartan in the grave emergencies of life. And the
neurotic woman, a chronic invalid for housework, may do a dragoon's work
for Woman Suffrage. It may be that no man can understand women; it is a
fact they do not understand themselves. But in this they are not unlike
men.
One might speak of the jealous woman, the selfish woman, the woman
envious of her more fortunate sisters, poisoning herself by bitter
thoughts. These traits belong to all men and women; they are part of
human nature, and they have their great uses as well as their
difficulties. Jealousy, selfishness, envy, three of the cardinal sins of
the theologian, are likewise three of the great motive forces of
mankind. They are important as reactions against life, not as qualities,
and we shall so consider them in a later chapter.
Though we have discussed the types predisposed to the nervousness of the
housewife, it is a cardinal thesis of this book that great forces of
society and the nature of her life situation are mainly responsible.
From now on we are face to face with these factors and must consider
them frankly and fully.