THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, THE HOME, AND MARRIAGE
No true sportsman ever prophesies. For the odds are overwhelmingly in
favor of the prophet. If he is right, he can brag the rest of his days
of his seer-like vision. If he is wrong, no one takes the trouble to
reproach or mock him.
Therefore I do not claim to be a prophet in discussing the future of
woman, the home, and marriage. At any time just one invention may come
along that will totally alter the face of things. Moreover we are now in
the midst of great changes in industry, in social relations, in the
largest matters of national and international nature. Men and women
alike are involved in these changes, but it is impossible to judge the
outcome. For history records many abortive reformations, many
reactionary centuries and eras as well as successful reformations and
progressive ages.
Whether or not it fits woman to be a housewife of the traditional kind,
feminism is certain to develop further. Women will enter into more
diverse occupations than ever before, they will enter politics, they
will find their way to direct power and action. More and more those who
work will be specialized and individualized--- the woman executive, the
writer, the artist, the doctor, lawyer, architect, chemist, and
sociologist--will resist the dictum "Woman's place is the Home." The
woman of this group will either be forced into celibacy, or in
ever-increasing numbers she will insist on some sort of arrangement
whereby she can carry on her work. She will perhaps refuse to bear
children and transform domesticity into an apartment hotel life, in
which she and her husband eat breakfast and dinner together and spend
the rest of the waking time separately, as two men might.
Such a development, while perhaps satisfying the ideas of progress of
the feminist, will be bad eugenically. There will be a removal from the
race of the value of these women, the intellectual members of their
sex. Whether the work this group of women do will equal the value of
the children they might have had no one can say.
But after all, the number of women who will enter the professions and
remain in them on the conditions above stated will be relatively small.
The main function of women will always be childbearing. If ever there
comes a time when the drift will be away from this function, then a
counter-movement will start up to sway women back into this sphere of
their functions. Moreover, the bulk of women entering industry will
enter it in the humbler occupations and they will in the main be willing
enough to marry and bear children, even in the limited way. Yet since
they enter marriage with a wider experience than ever before, the
conditions of marriage and the home must change, even though gradually.
So on the whole we may look to an increasing individuality of woman, an
increasing feeling of worth and dignity as an individual, an increasing
reluctance to take up life as the traditional housewife. Rebellion
against the monotony and the seclusive character of the home will
increase rather than diminish, and it must be faced without prejudice
and without any reliance on any authority, either of church or state,
that will force women back to "womanly" ways of thinking, feeling or
doing.
Sooner or later we shall have to accept legally what we now recognize as
fact,--the restriction of childbearing. Whether we regard it as good or
bad, the modern woman will not bear and nurse a large family. And the
modern man, though he has his little joke about the modern family, is
one with his wife in this matter. With husband and wife agreed there
seems little to do but accept the situation.
That this condition of affairs is leaving the peopling of the world to
the backward, the ignorant, and the careless is at present accepted by
most authors. One has only to read the serious articles on this subject
in the journals devoted to racial biology to realize how deeply
important the matter is. Yet there may be some undue alarm felt, for
contraceptive measures are becoming so prevalent in Europe, America, and
Asia that all races will soon be on the same footing, and moreover all
classes in society except the feeble-minded are learning the
procedures. The prolificness of the feeble-minded is indeed a menace,
and society may find itself compelled to lower their fertility
artificially.
What will probably happen is that the one, two, or three-child family
will be born before the mother's thirty-fifth year, and she will then or
before forty become free from the severest burdens of the housewife.
What will she do with her time; what will the better-to-do woman do?
Will she gradually give her energies to the community, or will she while
away her time in the spurious culture that occupies so many club women
to-day?
It is safe to say that women will enter far more largely than ever
before into movements for the betterment of the race. Though their way
of life may breed neurasthenia for some, it will have this great
advantage,--the mother feeling will sweep into society, will enter
politics, and social discussions. That we need that feeling no one will
deny who has ever tried to enlist social energies for race betterment
and failed while politicians stepped in for all the funds necessary even
for some anti-social activities. We have too much legalism in our social
structure and not near enough of the humanism that the socially minded
mother can bring.
Is the increasing incidence of divorce a revolt against domesticity? To
some extent yes, but where women obtain the divorce it is mainly a
refusal to tolerate unfaithfulness, desertion, incompatibility of
temperament. It does not mean that the family is threatened by
divorce,--rather that the family is threatened by the conditions for
which divorce is nowadays obtained and which were formerly not reasons
for divorce. In many countries adultery on the part of the man, cruel
and abusive treatment, chronic intoxication, and desertion were not
grounds for divorce. These to-day are the grounds for divorce, and in
the opinion of the writer they should invalidate a marriage. I would go
even further and say that wherever there was concealed insanity or
venereal disease the marriage should be annulled, as it is in some
States.
Divorce will not then diminish, despite the campaign against it, until
the conditions for which it is sought are removed. Until that time
comes, to bind two people together who are manifestly unhappy simply
encourages unfaithfulness and cruelty, and is itself a cruelty.
Whether we can devise a system where woman's individuality and humanness
can have scope and yet find her willing to accept the rôles of mother
and homekeeper, is a serious question. It seems to me certain that woman
will continue to demand her freedom, regardless of her status as wife
and mother. She will continue to receive more and more general and
special education, and she will continue to find the rôle of the
traditional housewife more uncongenial. Out of that maladaptation and
the discontent and rebellion will arise her neurosis.
In other words what we must seek to do--those of us who are not bound by
tradition alone but who seek to modify institutions to human beings
rather than the reverse--is to find out what changes in the home and
matrimonial conditions are necessary for the woman of to-day and
to-morrow.
That there has been a huge migration to the cities in the last century
is one of its outstanding peculiarities. This urban movement has meant
the greater concentration of humans in a given area, and it is therefore
directly responsible for the apartment house. That is to say, there has
been a trend away from individual homes, completely segregated and
individualized, to houses where at least part of the housework was
eliminated, in a sense was coöperative. This coöperation is increasing;
more and more houses have janitors, more and more houses furnish heat.
In the highest class of apartment house the trend is toward permanent
hotel life, with the exception that individual housekeeping is possible.
Because of the limited space and the desire of the modern well-to-do
woman to escape as much as possible from housekeeping, because of the
smaller families (which idea has been fostered by landlords), the number
of rooms and the size of the rooms have grown less. The kitchenette
apartment is a new departure for those who can afford more room, for it
is well known that the poor in the slums have long since lived in one or
two rooms serving all purposes. The huge modern apartment house, the
huge modern tenement house, are part first of the urban movement and
second of that movement away from housekeeping which has been sketched
in the Introduction.
The home has been praised as the nucleus of society, its center, its
heart. Its virtues have been so unanimously extolled that one need but
recite them. It is the embodiment of family, the soul of mother, father,
and children. It is the place where morality and modesty are taught. In
it arise the basic virtues of love of parents, love of children, love of
brothers and sisters; sympathy is thus engendered; loyalty has here its
source. The privacy of the home is a refuge from excitement and struggle
and gives rest and peace to the weary battler with the world. It is a
sanctuary where safety is to be sought, and this finds expression in the
English proverb, "Every Englishman's home is his castle." It is a
reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are
thrilled by the thought. Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of
its sex life. Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged.
Yet the home has great faults; it is no more a divine institution than
anything else human is. Without at all detracting from its great, its
indispensable virtues, let us, as realists, study its defects.
On the physical-economic side is the inefficiency and waste inseparable
from individual housekeeping. Labor-saving machinery and devices are
often too expensive for the individual home, and so small stoves do the
cooking and the heating, each individual housewife or her helper washes
by hand the dishes of each little group. Shopping is a matter for each
woman, and necessitates numberless small shops; perhaps the biggest
waste of time and energy lies here. The cooking is done according to the
intelligence and knowledge of nutrition of each housewife, and
housewives, like the rest of the world, range in intelligence from
feeble-mindedness to genius, with a goodly number of the uninformed,
unintelligent, and careless. Poets and novelists and the stage extol
home cooking, but the doctors and dietitians know there are as many
kinds of home cooking as there are kinds of homekeepers. The laboratory
and not the home has been the birthplace of the science of nutrition,
and we have still many traditions regarding the merits of home cooking
and feeding to break from.
Take as one minor example the gorging encouraged on Sunday and certain
holidays. The housewife feels it her duty to slave in a kitchen all
Sunday morning that an over-big meal may be eaten in half an hour by her
family. She encourages gluttony by feeling that her standing as cook is
directly proportional to the heartiness of her meal. Thanksgiving,
Christmas,--the good cheer of gluttony is sentimentalized and hallowed
into poetry and music. The table that groans under its good cheer has
its sequence in the diners who groan without cheer.
While we might further dilate on the physical deficiencies and
inefficiencies of the segregated home, there is a disadvantage of vaster
importance. After all, institutionalized cooking is rarely satisfactory,
because it lacks the spirit of good home cooking, the desire to meet
individual taste without profit. It lacks the ideal of service.
There are bad effects from the segregation and the privacy of the home,
even of the good kind. For there are very many bad homes; those in which
drunkenness, immorality, quarreling, selfishness, improvidence,
brutality, and crime are taught by example. After all, we like to speak
too much in generalities--the Home, Woman, Man, Labor, Capital,
Mankind--forgetting there is no such thing as "the Home." There are
homes of all kinds with every conceivable ideal of life and training and
having only one thing in common,--that they are segregated social units,
based usually on the family relationship. Montaigne very truly said
approximately this: "He who generalizes says 'Hello' to a crowd; he who
_knows_ shakes hands with individuals."
In the first place the home (to show my inconsistency in regard to
generalizing) is the place where prejudice is born, nourished, and grown
to its fullest proportions. The child born and reared in a home is
exposed to the contagion of whatever silliness and prejudice actuate the
lives and dominate the thought and feeling of its parents. And the
quirks and twists to which it is exposed affect its life either
positively or negatively, for it either accepts their prejudices or
develops counter-prejudices against them. To cite a familiar case; it is
traditional that some of the children brought up overstrictly,
overcarefully, throw off as soon as possible and as completely as
possible conventional morals and manners. Such persons have simply
overreacted to their training, revolted against the prejudice of their
teaching by building counter-prejudices.
Further, the home fosters an anti-social feeling, or perhaps it would be
kinder to say a non-social feeling. Your home-loving person comes in the
course of time to that state of mind where little else is of importance;
the home becomes the only place where his sympathies and his altruistic
purposes find any real outlet. The capitalist of the stage (and of real
life too) is one so devoted to his home and family that he decorates one
and the other with the trophies of other homes. There is none so devoted
to his home as the peasant, and there is no one so individualistic, so
intent in his own prosperity. The home encourages an intense altruism,
but usually a narrow one. The feeling of warmth and comfort of the
hearth fire when a blizzard rages outside too often makes us forget the
poor fellows in the blizzard.
Thus the home is the backbone of conservatism, which is good, but it
becomes also the basis of reactionary feeling. It is the people that
break away from home and home ties who do the great things.
When the home is quiet and harmonious it is the place where great
virtues are developed. But when it is noisy and disharmonious, then its
very seclusiveness, its segregation, lends to the quarrels the
bitterness of civil war. The intensity of feeling aroused is
proportional to the intimacy of the home and not to the importance of
the thing quarreled about. Good manners and that sign and symbol of
largeness of spirit, tolerance for the opinions of others, rarely are
born in the home.
It is hardly realized how much quarreling, how much of intense emotional
violence goes on in many homes. Its isolation and the absence of the
restraining influence of formality and courtesy bring the wills of the
family members into sharp conflict. Words are used that elsewhere would
bring the severest physical answer, or bring about the most complete
disruption of friendly relations. Love and anger, duty and self-interest
bring about intense inner conflict in the home, and the struggle between
the two generations, the rising and the receding, is here at its height.
That courtesy to each other might be taught the children, might be
insisted on by the parents is my firm belief. Love and intimacy need not
exclude form. Manners and morals are not exclusive of each other. If the
marriage ceremony included the vow to be polite, it might leave out
almost everything else. The home should be the place where tolerance,
courtesy, and emotional control are taught both by precept and example.
Can the home be altered to bring in more of the social spirit and yet
maintain its great virtues, its extraordinary attraction for the human
heart? It's an old story that criticism, the pointing out of defect, is
easy, while good suggestions are few and difficult to convert into
programs for action. In medicine diagnosis is far ahead of
treatment,--so in society at large.
Any plans that have for their end a sort of social barracks, with men
and women and their children living in apartments, but eating and
drinking in large groups, will meet the fiercest resistance from the
sentiment of our times and cannot succeed, unless it is forced on us by
some breakdown of the social structure. Nevertheless a larger
coöperation, at least in the cities, will come. Buildings must be built
so that a deal of individual labor disappears. Just as coöperative
stores are springing up, so coöperative kitchens, community kitchens
organized for service would be a great benefit. Especially for the poor,
without servants, where the woman is frequently forced to neglect her
own rest and the children's welfare because she must cook, would such a
development be of great value. Unfortunately the few community kitchens
now operating have in mind only the middle-class housewife and not the
housewife in most need,--the poor housewife. Here is a plan for real
social service; cooking for the poor of the cities, scientific,
nutritious, tasty, at cost. Much of the work of medicine would be
eliminated with one stroke; much of racial degeneracy and misery would
disappear in a generation.
That the home needs labor-saving devices in order that much of the
disagreeable work may be eliminated is unquestioned. Inventive genius
has only given a fragmentary attention to the problems of the housewife.
Most of the devices in use are far beyond the means of the poor and even
the lower middle class. Furthermore, though they save labor many of
them do not save time. The tests by which the good household device
ought to be judged are these:
First--Is it efficient?
Second--Is it labor saving?
Third--Is it time saving?
We need to break away from traditional cooking apparatus and traditional
diet. The installation and use of fireless cookers, self-regulating
ovens, is a first step. The discarding of most of the puddings, roasts,
fancy dishes that take much time in the preparation and that keep the
housewife in the kitchen would not only save the housewife but would
also be of great benefit to her husband. The cult of hearty eating,
which results in keeping a woman (mistress or maid) in the kitchen for
three or more hours that a man may eat for twenty or thirty minutes is
folly. The type of meal that either takes only a short time for
preparation and devices which render the attention of the housewife
unnecessary are ethical and healthy, both for the family and society.
The joys of the table are not to be despised, and only the dyspeptic or
the ascetic hold them in contempt; but simplicity in eating is the very
heart of the joy of the table.
Elaboration and gluttony are alike in this,--they increase the housework
and decrease the well-being of the diner.
How to maintain the sweetness of the family spirit of the home and yet
bring into it a wider social spirit, break down its isolated
individualistic character, is a problem I do not pretend to be able to
solve. Ancient nations emphasized the social-national aspect of life
overmuch, as for example the Spartans; the modern home overemphasizes
the family aspect. We must avoid extremes by clinging to the virtues and
correcting the vices of the home.
Alarmists are constantly raising the cry that marriage is declining and
that society is thereby threatened at its very heart. There is the
pessimist who feels that the "irreligion" of to-day is responsible;
there is the one who blames feminism; and there is the type that finds
in Democracy and liberalism generally the cause of the receding
old-fashioned morality. Divorce, late marriage, and child-restriction
are the manifestations of this decadence, and the press, the pulpit,
science, and the State all have taken notice of these modern phenomena,
though with widely differing attitudes.
That matrimony is changing cannot be questioned or denied. The main
change is that woman is entering more and more as an equal partner whose
rights the modern law recognizes as the ancient law did not. She is no
longer to be classed as exemplified by the famous words of Petruchio,
when he claimed his wife, the erstwhile shrew, as his property in
exactly the same sense as any domestic animal, linking the wife with the
horse, the cow, the ass, as the chattels of the man. The law agreed to
this attitude of the man, the Church supported it; woman, strangely
enough, seemed to glory in it.
With the rise of woman into the status of a human being (a revolution
not yet accomplished in entirety) the property relationship weakened but
lingers very strongly as a tradition that molds the lives of husband and
wife. Women are still held more rigidly to their duties as wives than
men to their duties as husbands, and the will of the husband still rules
in the major affairs of life, even though in a thousand details the wife
rules. Theoretically every man willingly acknowledges the importance of
his wife as mother and homekeeper, but practically he acts as if his
work were the really important activity of the family. The obedience of
the wife is still asked for by most of the religious ceremonies of the
times. Two great opinions are therefore still struggling in the home and
in society; one that matrimony implies the dependence and essential
inferiority of woman, and the other that the man and woman are equal
partners in the relationship. I fully realize that the advocate of the
first opinion will deny that the inferiority of woman is at all implied
in their standpoint. But it is an inferior who vows obedience, it is the
inferior who loses legal rights, it is the inferior who yields to
another the "headship" of the home.
The struggle of these two opinions will have only one outcome, the
complete victory of the modern belief that the sexes are, all in all,
equal, and that therefore marriage is a contract of equals. Meanwhile
the struggling opinions, with the scene of conflict in every home, in
every heart, cause disorder as all struggles do. When the victory is
complete, then conduct will be definite and clear-cut, then the home
will be reorganized in relation to the new belief, and then new problems
will arise and be met. How conduct will be changed, what the new
problems will be and how they will be met, I do not pretend to know.
Meanwhile there is this to say,--that marriage should be guarded so that
the grossly unfit do not marry. A thorough physical examination is as
necessary for matrimony as it is for civil service, and many of the
horrors every generation of doctors has witnessed could be eliminated at
once and for all time.
Further, if marriage is a desirable state, and on the whole it must be
preferred to a single existence, surely so long as our code of morals
remains unchanged, and so long as we believe the race must be
perpetuated, then the too late marriage should be discouraged. The ideal
age for women to enter matrimony is from twenty-two to twenty-five; the
ideal age for men is from twenty-five to twenty-eight. It is not my
province to deal at length with this subject, but I may state that I
believe that continence beyond these ages becomes increasingly
difficult, that immorality is encouraged, that adaptability becomes
lessened, and that wiser selection of mates does _not_ occur. But how
bring about early marriages in a time when the luxuries seem to have
become necessities, and therefore the necessity of marriage is eyed more
and more as an extravagance of the foolhardy? How bring about early
marriage when women are earning pay almost equal to that of the men and
are therefore more reluctant to enter matrimony unless at a high
standard of living. The late marriage is an evil, but how it can be
displaced by the early marriage under the present social scheme I do not
see.
We have considered divorce before this. It is not an evil but a symptom
of evil; not a disease in itself. It cannot be lessened or abolished
unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live
together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another.
We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental
mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial
reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another,
according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace
in one age is cruelty in the next, and this is a matter not of argument
but of expectation and feeling.
Nothing more need be said of contraceptive measures than this: they are
inevitably increasing in use and soon will be part of the average
marriage. Society must recognize this, and the lawmakers must legalize
what they themselves practise.
Matrimony, the home, woman, these are nodal points in the network of our
human lives. But they are not fixed centers, and the great weaver, Time,
changes the design constantly. Through them run the threads of the great
instincts, of tradition, of economic change, of the ideas, ideals, and
activities of man the restless. Man will always love woman, woman will
always love man; children will be born and reared, and sex conflict,
maladjustment, will always be secondary to these great facts. How men
and women will live together, how they will arrange for the children,
will be questions that women will help the world answer as well as their
mates. That the main trend of things is for better, more ethical, more
just relationship, I do not doubt. The secondary, most noisy changes
are perhaps evil, the main primary change is good.
Meanwhile in the hurly-burly of new things, of complex relationships,
working blindly, is the nervous housewife. This book has been written
that she may know herself better and thus move towards the light; that
her husband may win sympathy and understanding and be bound to her in a
closer, better union, and that the physician and Society may seek the
direct and the remote means to helping her.
INDEX
Alcoholism and housewife, 157
Anger, 88
Beauty, loss of, 88
Birth control, 14-16
Birth control measures and nervousness, 137
Cases, treatment of, 231-243
Child and cartoons, 113
and movies, 111
Childbearing and modern woman, 15
Children and the neurosis, 97-115
Daydreaming, 81
Diet and Cooking, 259
Disagreeable, reaction to the, 90
Divorce, 13
Emotions, effects of, 27-30; 42-45
Engagement period, 229
Extravagance of the housewife, 145
Fear, 93
Feminism and individualization of woman, 10-13
Happiness and high cost of living, 151
Histories of cases:
case with bad hygiene, 183-187
hyperæsthetic woman, 187-193
over-rich, purposeless type, 177-181
overworked, under-rested type, 171-177
physically ill type, 181-183
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 5
Home,
aboriginal, 5
faults of, 225
future of, 250
isolation of, 77
Household conflicts, 141-159
Housewife,
hyperæsthetic type of, 51
non-domestic type of, 61
overconscientious type of, 53
overemotional type of, 57
physically ill, 69
previously neurotic, 65
types predisposed to nervousness, 47-73
Housewife and abnormal child, 107
and childbearing, 99
and neglect, 153
and poverty, 117
Housewife of past generation, 3
Housework,
evolution of, 5-10
nature of, 75
Housework and factory, 9
Husband and housewife, 127
Hysteria, 35
Jealousy and envy, 123
Marriage, conflicting views of, 127
Marriage and sex relationship, 131-140
Monotony, effects of, 79
Nervousness, 17-20
Nervousness and child hygiene, 100
Nervousness and sick child, 104
Neurasthenia,
causes, 9
symptoms, 20-26
Neurasthenia and fear, 23
Pruriency of our times, 275
Psychasthenia, 31
Psychoneuroses, 18
Sedentary life, effects of, 83
Sex and society, 139
Subconscious, 29
Symptoms as weapons against husband, 161
Voltaire and constipation, 23
Will to power through weakness, 163, 212
Woman, arts and crafts, 6-8
Woman,
discontent of, 13
future of, 244
training of, 48-50
Woman, industry and home, 8-10
Worry, 119
_By the Author of "RELIGION and HEALTH"_
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_Medical Director of Fordham University School of Sociology_
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Nervous Housewife, by Abraham Myerson