REACTION TO THE DISAGREEABLE
A few preliminary words about the disagreeable in the housewife's lot
will be of value.
We may divide the things, situations, and happenings of life into three
groups,--the agreeable, the indifferent, and the disagreeable. No two
men will agree in detail in judging what is agreeable, indifferent, or
disagreeable. There are as many different points of view as there are
people, and in the end what is one man's meat may literally be another
man's poison. There are, however, only a few ways of reacting to what
one considers the disagreeable. The agreeable things of life do not
cause a neurosis, though they may injure character or impair efficiency.
And we may neglect the theoretical indifferent.
1. A disagreeable thing may be so disastrous in our viewpoint as to
cause fear. This fear may be expressed as flight, which is a normal
reaction, or it may be expressed by a sort of paralysis of function, as
the fainting spell, or the great weakness which makes flight impossible.
Fear is a much abused emotion. People speak glibly about taking it out
of life, on the ground that it is wholly harmful. "Children must not
experience fear; it is wrong, it is immoral; they should grow up in
sunshine and gladness, without fear." A whole sect, many minor
religions, take this Pollyanna attitude toward reality.
As a matter of fact fear is _a_ (I almost said _the_) great motive force
of human life. Fear of the elements was the incentive to shelter; fear
of starvation started agriculture and the storage of food; fear of
disease and death gives medicine its standing; fear of the unknown is
the backbone of conservatism, and fear of the rainy day is the source of
thrift. Fear of death is not only the basis of religion, but of life
insurance as well. Fear of the finger of scorn and the blame of our
fellows is the great force in morality. And no amount of attempted unity
with God will ever take the place of the injunction to fear Him!
2. While fear then is back of the constructive forces of life it works
hand in hand with another emotion that is also greatly disparaged by
sentimentalists,--anger. The disagreeable, by balking an instinct, by
obstructing a wish or purpose, may arouse anger. The anger may blaze
forth in a sudden destructive fury in an effort to remove the obstacle,
or it may simmer as a patient sullenness, or it may link itself with
thought and become a careful plan to overcome the opposition. It may
range all the way from the blow of violence to burning indignation
against wrong and injustice; it is the source of the fighting spirit.
Without fear, purpose would never be born; without anger in some form or
other it would never be fulfilled.
3. But while fear and anger work well in succession, or at different
times, when both emotions are awakened by some disagreeable situation or
thing, when there is a helpless anger, when the instinct to fight is
paralyzed by fear, when doubt arises, then there is deënergization.
Thus a hostile situation, an intensely disagreeable situation, may be
met with energy: viz. planning, constructive flight, destructive
action, or it may be met with a deënergization, confusion, paralysis,
hopeless anger. It may cause an intense inner conflict with high
constant emotions, fatigue, incapacity to choose the proper action, and
the peculiar agony of doubt.
This last type of reaction is a very common one in the housewife. For
the situation is never clear-cut for decision--there is the ideal
implanted by training, education, social pressure, and her own desire to
live in conformity with this ideal; there is opposing it disgust, anger,
weariness, lack of interest that her house duties bring with them. This
conflict leads nowhere so far as action is concerned, for she can
neither accept nor reject the situation.
This is to say: The human being needs primarily a definite point of
view, a definite starting place for his actions. Some belief, some goal,
some definite purpose is needed for the rallying of the energy of mind
and body. Drifting is intolerable to the acute, active mind bent upon
some achievement before death. Man is the only animal keenly aware of
his mortality, and consequently he is the only one to fear the passing
of time. This passing of time can be received equably by the one
conscious of achievement, or who has some compensation in belief and
purpose; it becomes intolerable to those in doubt.
Fundamentally one may say that neurasthenia and the allied diseases
which we are here summing up as the nervousness of the housewife are
reactions to the disagreeable. The fatigue, pains and aches, changes in
mood and emotion are born of this reaction, except in those cases where
they arise from definite bodily disease, and even here a vicious circle
is established. The weakness and fatigue state, the consciousness of
impaired power brought about by sickness, are reacted to in a
neurasthenic manner. It is not often enough realized by physicians that
a physical defect or a physical injury may be reacted to so as to bring
about nervous and mental symptoms; may cause the emotions of fear,
hopeless anger, and sorrow; may cause an agony of doubt.
With these few words on types of reactions to the disagreeable let us
turn again to the disagreeable factors in our housewife's life which may
cause her neurosis.
The child is the central bond of the home and is of course the
biological reason for marriage. The maternal instinct has long been
recognized as one of the great civilizing factors, the source of much of
human sympathy and the gentler emotions. While the beautiful side of the
mother-child relationship is well known and cannot be overestimated, the
maternal instinct has its fierce, its jealous, its narrow aspect. Love
and sympathy for one's own in a competitive world have often as their
natural results injustice and hardness for the children of others. While
the best type of mother irradiates her love for her own into love for
all children, it is not uncommon for women to find their chiefest source
of rivalry in the progress and welfare of their children.
Maternal devotion is largely its own reward. The child takes the
maternal sacrifices for granted, and after the first few years the
interests of parent and child diverge. There is a never-ending struggle
between the rising and the receding generations, which is inherent in
the nature of things and will always exist wherever the young are free.
All the world honors the mother, but few children return in anything
like equality the love and sacrifices of their own mother.
Is the maternal instinct waning in intensity in this period of
feminization? There have always been some bad, careless, selfish
mothers; has their number increased? Probably not, yet the maternal
instinct now has competition in the heart of the modern woman. The
desire to participate in the world's activity, the desire to learn, to
acquire culture, engenders a restless impatience with the closed-in life
of the mother-housewife. This interferes with single-minded motherhood,
brings about conflict, and so leads to mental and bodily unrest. Of
course this interferes little or not at all with some, probably most of
the present-day mothers, but is a factor of importance in the lives of
many.
The nervous housewife has several difficulties in her relations to her
children. These are of importance in understanding her and have been
touched on before this, but it will be of advantage to consider them as
a group.
We have said that the opinion of obstetricians is that the modern woman
has more difficulty in delivering herself than did her ancestress. If
this is true (and we may be dealing with the fact that obstetricians are
often the ones to see the difficult cases, or that these stand out in
their memories) there are several explanations.
First, women marry later than they did. It may be said that the first
child is easiest born before the mother is twenty-five years of age, and
that from that time on a first child is born with rapidly increasing
difficulty. The pelvis, like all the bony-joint structures of the body,
loses plasticity with years, and plasticity is the prime need for
childbearing. Similarly with the uterus, which is of course a muscular
organ, but possesses an elastic force that diminishes as the woman grows
older.
Second, the vigor of the uterine contractions upon which the passage of
the baby depends is controlled largely by the so-called sympathetic
nervous system, though glands throughout the body are very important
factors as well. This part of the nervous system and these glands are
part of the mechanism of emotion as well as of childbearing, and emotion
plays a rôle of importance in childbearing. The modern woman _fears_
childbearing as her ancestress did not, partly through greater
knowledge, partly through her divided attitude towards life.
Having a harder time in childbearing means a slower convalescence, a
need for more rest and care. Then nursing becomes somehow more
difficult, more wearing to the mother; she rebels more against it, and
yet, knowing its importance, she tries to "keep her milk." It often
seems that the more women know about nursing, the less able they are to
nurse, that the ignorant slum-dweller who nurses the child each time it
cries and drinks beer to furnish milk does better than her enlightened
sister who nurses by the clock and drinks milk as a source of her baby's
supply.
The feeling of great responsibility for her child's welfare that the
modern woman has acquired, as a result of popular education in these
matters, undoubtedly saves infants' lives and is therefore worth the
price. A secondary result of importance, and one not good, is the added
liability to fatigue and breakdown that the mother acquires. This factor
we meet again in the next phase of our subject, the education and
training of children.
Though the number of children has conspicuously decreased, the care and
attention given them has increased in inverse proportion. The woman with
six children or more turned over the younger children to the older ones,
so that her burden, though heavy, was much less than it may seem.
Further, though she loved and cared for them, she knew far less of
hygiene than her descendant; she did not try to bring them up in a
germless way; and her household activities kept her too busy to allow
her to notice each running nose, or each "festering sore." Not having
nearly so much knowledge of disease, she had much less fear and was
spared this type of deënergization. Her daughter views with alarm each
cough and sneeze, has sinister forebodings with each rash; pays an
enormous attention to the children's food, and through an increasing
attention to detail in her child's life and actions has a greater
liability to break under the greater responsibility and
conscientiousness.
It must be remembered that the feeling of responsibility and
apprehensive attention is not merely "mental." It means fatigue, more
disturbance of appetite, and less restful sleep. These are things of
great importance in causing nervousness; in fact, they constitute a
large part of it.
Perhaps another generation will find that hygiene can be taught without
producing fussiness and fear. Certainly popular education has its value,
but it has a morbid side that now needs attention. This morbid side is
not only bad for the mother but is unqualifiedly bad for the child.
For the child of to-day, the center of the family stage in his
attention, is often either spoiled or made neurasthenic by his
treatment. Either he is frankly indulged, or else an over-critical
attitude is taken toward him. "Bad habits must not be formed" is the
actuating motive of the overconscientious parents, for they do not seem
to know that the "trial and error" method is the natural way of
learning. Children take up one habit after another for the sake of
experience and discard them by themselves. For a child to lie, to steal,
to fight, to be selfish, to be self-willed is not at all unnatural; for
him to have bad table manners and to forget admonition in general and
against these manners in particular is his birthright, so to speak.
Yet many a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection
and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into
seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her
fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and thence into a vicious
character.
Especially is this true of the overæsthetic, overconscientious types
described in Chapter III. I have seen women who made the dinner table
less a place to eat than a place where a child was pilloried for his
manners,--pilloried into sullen, appetiteless state.
So, too, an unfortunate publicity given to child prodigies brought with
it for a short time an epidemic of forced intellectual feeding of
children, that produced only a precocious neurasthenia as its great
result. Similarly the Montessori method of child training which made
every woman into a kindergarten teacher did a hundred times more harm
than good, despite the merits of the system. That a child needs to
experiment with life himself means that it will be a long time before
the average mother will know how to help him.
A factor that tends to perplex the mother and hurts the training of the
child is her doubt as how "to discipline." Shall it be the old-fashioned
corporal punishment of a past generation, the appeal to pain and blame?
Shall it be the nowadays emphasized moral suasion, the appeal to
conscience and reason? With all the preachers of new methods filling her
ear she finds that moral suasion fails in her own child's case, and yet
she is afraid of physical punishment.
This is not the place to study child training in any extensive manner,
yet it needs be said that praise and blame, pleasure and pain, are the
great incentives to conduct. One cannot drive a horse with one rein;
neither can one drive a child into social ways, social conformity by one
emotion or feeling. Corporal punishment is a necessity, sparingly used
but vigorously used when indicated. Of course praise is needed and so is
reward.
What is here to be emphasized is that a sense of great responsibility
and an over-critical attitude toward the children is a factor of
importance in the nervous state of the modern housewife. Increasing
knowledge and increasing demand have brought with them bad as well as
good results. Here as elsewhere a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,
but a more serious difficulty is this,--though fads in training arise
that are loudly proclaimed as the only way, there is as yet no real
science of character or of character growth.
The tragedy of illness is acute everywhere, and the sick child is in
every household. In many cases I have traced the source of the
housewife's neurosis to the care and worry furnished by one child. There
are truly delicate children who "catch everything", who start off by
being difficult to nurse, and who pass from one infection to another
until the worried mother suspects disease with every change in the
child's color. A sick child is often a changed child, changed in all the
fundamental emotions,--cranky, capricious, unaffectionate, difficult to
care for. A sick child means, except where servants and nurses can be
commanded, disturbed sleep, extra work, confinement to the house, heavy
expense, and a heightened tension that has as its aftermath, in many
cases, collapse. The savor of life seems to go, each day is a throbbing
suspense.
With recovery, if the woman can rest, in the majority of cases no
marked degree of deënergization follows. But in too many cases rest is
not possible, though it is urgently needed. The mother needs the care of
convalescence more than does the child.
There is an extraordinary lack of provision for the tired housewife.
True there are sanataria galore, with beautiful names, in pretty places,
well equipped with nurses and doctors to care for their patients. But
these are prohibitive in price, and at the present writing the cheapest
place is about forty dollars per week. This rate puts them out of the
reach of the great majority who need them.
Moreover, where there are small children and where there is no trusty
servant or some kindly relative or friend it seems impossible for the
housewife to leave the home. Her husband must work daily for their bread
and unless they are willing to turn to the charitable organizations, it
is necessary for the housewife to carry on, despite her fatigue. So at
the best she gets an hour or two extra rest a day, takes a "little
tonic" from the family doctor and gets along with her pains, her aches,
and moods as best she can.
But the sick do not always recover. Fortunately, the average human
being grieves a while over death, but the life struggle soon absorbs
him, and the bereavement itself becomes a memory. But now and then one
meets mothers whose griefs and deprivations seem without end. No
religion, no philosophy can bring them back into continuity with their
lives. They go about in a sorrowful dream, hugging their affliction,
resenting any effort to comfort or console; without interest in the
daily task or in those whom they should love. They offer the severest
problem in readjustment, in reënergization, for they actively resent
being helped. Sometimes one believes their grief is an effort to atone
for neglect real or fancied, a self-punishment which is not remitted
until full atonement has been made.
Aside from the physical difficulties in the bearing and rearing of
children, and in addition to the ordinary mental difficulties, such as
judging what discipline to use, there are especial problems of some
importance. Men vary in character from the saint to the villain, in
ability from the genius to the idiot. The children they once were vary
as much. There are children who go through the worst of homes, the
worst of environments, the worst of trainings,--and come out pure gold,
with characters all the better for the struggle. There are others whom
no amount of love, discipline, training, and benefits help; they are
despicable from the ordinary viewpoint from the first of life to the
last. Some children, adversely situated as to poverty and health, become
geniuses, and their reverse is in the poor child whom heredity, early
disease, or some freak of nature dooms to feeble-mindedness.
The heart of the mother is in her child; she glories in its progress,
and she refuses to see its defects until they glare too brightly to be
overlooked. Then she has a heartbreak all the more bitter for her
maternal love.
It is the incorrigibly bad child and the mentally deficient child who
evoke the severest, most neurasthenic reaction on the part of the
housewife. Not only is pride hurt, not only is the expanded self-love
injured, but such children are a physical care and burden of such a
nature as to outbalance that of three or four normal children.
The bad child, egoistic, undisciplinable, destructive, and quarrelsome,
or the child who cannot be taught honesty, or the one who continually
runs away, is an unending source of "nervousness" to his mother. As time
goes on and the difficulty is seen to be fundamental, a battle between
hostility and love springs up in the mother's breast that plays havoc
with her strength and character. The very worst cases of housewife
neurosis are seen in such mothers; the most profound interference with
mood, emotion, purpose, and energy results.
Similarly, with the mother of the feeble-minded child. At first the
child is viewed as a bit slow in walking, talking, in keeping clean, and
the mother explains it all away on this ground or that. A previous
illness, a fall in which the head was hurt, difficulty with the
teething, diet, etc., all receive the blame. Alas! In the course of time
the child goes to kindergarten and the terrible report comes back that
"the child cannot learn, is clumsy, etc.", and the teacher thinks he
should be examined. Then either through the examination or through the
pressure of repeated observations mother love yields to the truth and
feeble-mindedness is recognized.
There are plenty of women who, with this fact established, adjust
themselves, make up their minds to it. But others find that it takes all
the pleasure out of their lives, become morbid, and do not enjoy their
normal children. For with all due respect to eugenics and statistics I
am convinced that the most of feeble-mindedness is accidental or
incidental, and not a matter of heredity. Once a mother gets imbued with
the notion that the condition is hereditary, she falls into agonies of
fear for her other children. In my mind there is a thoroughly
reprehensible publicity given to half-baked work in heredity, mental
hygiene, and the like that does far more harm than good and interferes
with the legitimate work.
There is no offhand solution for the case of the incorrigible boy or
girl. Of course the largest number sooner or later reform, sometimes
overnight, and in a way to remind one of the religious conversions that
James speaks of in his "Varieties of Religious Experiences." So long as
a child has a social streak in his make-up, so long as he at least is
responsive to the praise and blame of others and understands that he
does wrong, so long may one hope for him. But the child to whom the
opinion of others seems of no value, who follows his own egoism without
check or control by the accepted standard of conduct, by the moral law,
by the praise and blame of those near to him, is almost hopeless. Some
day intelligence may keep him out of trouble, but by itself it cannot
change his nature.
It is not sufficiently realized that while there has been a rise of
feminism there has also been a great change in the status of children, a
change that makes their care far more difficult than in the past. They
have risen from subordinate figures in the household, schooled in
absolute obedience, "to be seen and not heard," to the central figures
in the household. One of the strangest of revolutions has taken place in
America, taken place in almost every household, and without the notice
of historians or sociologists. That is because these professional
students of humanity have their attention focused on little groups of
figures called the leaders, and not nearly enough on that mass which
gives the leaders their direction and power.
The age of the child! His development parallels that of women, in that
an individualization has taken place. In the past education and training
took notice of the child-group, not of the individual child. But
child-culture has taken on new aspects, punishment has been largely
superseded, individual study and treatment are the thing. Personality is
the aim of education, especial aptitudes are recognized in the various
types of schools that have arisen: commercial, industrial, classical;
yes, and even schools for the feeble-minded.
All this is admirable, and in another century will bring remarkable
results. Even to-day some good has come, but this is largely vitiated by
other influences.
Aside from the fact that the attention paid the child often increases
his self-importance and makes his wishes more capricious, there are
factors that tend to rob him of his naïveté.
These factors are the movies, the newspapers, and the spread of
luxurious habits amongst children.
The movies are marvelous agents for the spread of information and
misinformation. Because of the natural settings they give to the most
absurd and unnatural stories, their essential falsity and unreality is
often made the more pernicious. Their possibilities for good are
enormous, their actual performance is conspicuously to lower the public
taste, to create a habit which discourages earnest reading or
intelligent entertainment. For children they act as a stimulant of an
unwholesome kind, acquainting them with realistic crime, vice, and
vulgarity, giving them a distaste for childlike enjoyment. One sees
nowadays altogether too often the satiated child who seeks excitement,
the cynical, overwise child filled with the lore of the movies.
In similar fashion the "comic" cartoons of the newspapers have an
extraordinary fascination for children. Every child wants to read the
funny page, though the funny page is not for childish reading. The humor
is coarse, slangy, and distinctly vulgar; very clever frequently and
thoroughly enjoyable to those whom it cannot harm.
If the historians of, say, 4500 A.D. were by chance to get hold of a few
copies of our newspapers of 1920 they might legitimately conclude that
the denizen of this remote period expressed surprise by falling backward
out of his shoes, expressed disagreement by striking the other person
over the head with a brick or a club; that women were always taller than
their mates and usually "beat them up"; that all husbands, especially if
elderly, chased after every young and pretty girl. They might conclude
that the language of the mass of the people was of such remarkable types
as this: "You tell them Casket, I'm Coffin", or "the Storm and Strife is
coming; beat it!"
No one I think enjoys the comic page more than the present writer,--yet
it spreads a demoralizing virus amongst children. Of what use is it to
teach children good English when the newspaper deliberately teaches them
the cheapest slang? Of what use is it to teach them manners and
kindliness when the newspaper constantly spreads boorishness and "rough
house" conduct? Of what use is it to raise taste when this is injured at
the very outset of life by giving bad taste a fascinating attraction?
Throughout the community there is a stir and excitement that is
reflecting on the children. There are so many desirable luxuries in the
world now, so many revealed by movie and symbolized by the automobile,
the cabaret, the increasing vulgarity of the theater (the disappearance
of the drama and the omnipresent girl and music show), a restless search
for pleasure throughout the community even before the War, have not
missed the child.
All these things make the lot of the housewife harder in so far as the
training of her children is concerned. She is dealing with a more alert,
more sophisticated, more sensuous child,--and one who knows his place
and power. The press and the theater both have knowledge of this and a
recent witty play dealt with the sins of the children, paraphrasing of
course the classic of a bygone day, "Sins of the Fathers." And a wise
old gentleman said to his grandson recently, when the lad complained
about his mother, "Of course you are right. Every son has a right to be
obeyed by his mother."
I am by no means a pessimist. Every forward step has its bad side, but
nevertheless is a forward step. It is in the nature of things that we
shall never reach a millennium, though we may considerably improve the
value and dignity of human life. Democracy has a rôle in the world of
great importance,--but the spread of education and opportunity to the
mass may make it more difficult for the best ideals and customs to
survive in the avalanche of mediocrity that becomes released by the
agencies that profit by appealing to the mass. So, too, the rise of the
woman and child bring us face to face with new problems, which I think
are less difficult problems than those they have superseded and
replaced, but which are yet of importance.
And a great problem is this: how to individualize the child and keep
from spoiling him; how to give him freedom and pleasure, and keep him
from sophistication.