The Nervous Housewife Part 6

In the story of Buddha it is related that it was the shock of learning of the existence of four great evils which aroused his desire to save mankind. These evils were Old Age, Sickness, Death, and Poverty.

Theologians and the sentimentalists are unanimous in their praise of poverty,--the theologians because they seek their treasure in heaven, and the sentimentalists because they are incorrigible dodgers of reality, because they cannot endure the existence of evil. But Buddha knew better, and the common sense of mankind has shown itself in the desperate struggle to reach riches.

We have spoken of the part played by the physical disadvantages of poverty in causing the nervousness of the housewife. It is not alleged or affirmed that all poor housewives suffer from the neurosis,--that would be nonsense. But poor food, poor housing, poor clothing, the lack of vacations, the insufficient convalescence from illness and childbirth are not blessings nor do they have anything but a bad effect, an effect traceable in the conditions we are studying.

Furthermore, the woman who does all her own housework, including the cooking, scrubbing, washing, ironing, and the mult.i.tudinous details of housekeeping, in addition to the bearing and rearing of children, does more than any human being should do. It is very well to say, "See what the women of a past generation did," but could we look at the thing objectively, we would see that they were little better than slaves. That is the long and short of it,--the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation did not include them.

Aside from the physical effects of poverty on the housewife, there are factors of psychical importance that call for a hearing. After all, what is poverty in one age is riches in another; what is poverty for one man is wealth to his neighbor. More than that, what a man considers riches in antic.i.p.ation is poverty in realization. Here again we deal with the mounting of desire.

The philosophical, contented woman, satisfied with her life even though it is poor, is exempted from one great factor making for breakdown.

Contentment is the great shield of the nervous system, the great bulwark against fatigue and obsession. But contentment leads away from achievement, which springs from discontent, from yearning desire.

Whether civilization in the sense of our achievements is worth the price paid is a matter upon which the present writer will not presume to pa.s.s judgment. Whether it is or not, Mankind is committed to struggle onward, regardless of the result to his peace of mind.

There are two princ.i.p.al psychical injuries with poverty--fear and worry--and we must pa.s.s to their consideration as factors in the neuroses of some women.

Worry is chronic fear directed against a life situation, usually antic.i.p.ated. Man the foreseeing must worry or he dies,--dies of starvation, disease, disaster. It is true that worry may be excessive and directed either against imaginary or inevitable ills; ills that never come, ills that must come, like old age and death.

Men in comfortable places cry "Why worry?" meaning of course that the most of worry is about ills that are never realized. That is true, but the person living just on the brink of disaster, ruined or made dependent on charity by unemployment, a long illness, or any failure of power and strength, cannot be as philosophical as the man fortified by a nice bank account or dividend-paying investments. These well-to-do advisers of the poor remind one of the heroes of ancient fables who, having magic weapons and impenetrable armor, showed no fear in battle.

One wonders how much courage they would have had if armed as their foemen were.

For the poor housewife who sees no escape from poverty, whose husband is either a workman or a struggling business man always on the edge of failure, life often seems like a wall closing in, a losing battle without end.

Especially in the middle-aged, in those approaching fifty, does this happen. Aside from the condition produced by "change of life", the so-called involution period, there is a reaction of the "time of life"

that is found very commonly. For old age is no longer far off on the horizon; it is close at hand, around the corner, and the looking-gla.s.s proclaims its coming. The woman wonders whether her husband will long be able to keep up,--and then "what will become of us?"

To be thrown on the benevolence of children is a sad ending to independent natures, to people of experience. Crudely put, those who have been dependents are now sustainers; those who have been led now guide; the inferiors are the superiors. This is not cynicism, for with the best intentions in the world, if the children are also poor, the care of the parents is a burden that they cannot help showing, sooner or later.

Looking forward to such an ending to the hard work and struggle of a lifetime is part of the worry of poverty, to be cla.s.sed with the fear of sickness and unemployment.

We may loudly proclaim that one honest man is as good as another, that character is the measure of worth, that success cannot be measured by money. These things are true; the difficulty is not to make people believe it, it is to make people _feel_ it. Deeply ingrained in poverty is not alone to be deprived of things desired; more important is the feeling of inferiority that goes with the condition. Only in the Bohemia of the novelists do the poor feel equal to the rich.

One of the fundamental strivings of the human being is the enlargement of the self-feeling, which fundamentally is the wish to be superior, to have the admiration and homage of others. All daydreaming builds this air castle; all ambition has this as its goal. No matter how we disguise it to ourselves and others, the main ends of purpose are power and place. True, we may wish for power and place so as to help others; we may wish them as the result of constructive work and achievement, but the enlargement of self-feeling is the end result of the striving.

To be poor is to be inferior in feeling and applies equally to men and women. Man is a compet.i.tive-social animal and competes in everything, from the cleverness and beauty of his children to the excellence of his taste in hats. Money has the advantage of being the symbol of value, of being concrete and definite, and of having the inestimable property of purchasing power.

Now woman is as compet.i.tive as her mate. A housewife vies with her neighboring housewives in her clothes, her good looks, her youth, her husband, her children, her home, her housekeeping, her money,--vies with her in folly as well as in wisdom. How much of the extravagance of women (and here is a difficulty to be dealt with later) arises from rivalry only the tongues of women could tell, but it is safe to say that the greater part of it has this origin.

Jealousy and envy are harsh words, yet they stand for traits having a great psychological value. Part of the impetus for effort rises from these feelings, and an incredibly large part. Many a man who bends unremitting in his effort has in mind some man of whose success he is envious, or whose efforts he watches with a jealousy hidden almost from himself.

Upon women these feelings play with devastating force. One may be satisfied with what he has until some one else he knows gets more; that is to say, the causes of most of the dissatisfaction and discontent of the world are envy and jealousy. In many cases it may be a righteous sort of jealousy or envy. A woman, especially because she is a rival of her fellow-woman mainly in small things, becomes acutely miserable when she is outstripped by her neighbor and especially if she is pa.s.sed by her relatives and intimate friends.

Poverty is especially hard on those intensely ambitious for their children. "They must have the education I did not have; they must have a good time in life which I never had; I don't want them to be poor all their lives like we are." Here is the woman who works herself to the bone, yet is content and well save for her fatigue, if her children respond to her efforts by success in study and by ambitious efforts of their own. But if the struggling mother is so unfortunate as to have drawn in Nature's lottery an unappreciative or a weak-minded child, then the breakdown is tragic.

A poor man is much more apt to be philosophical about poverty for his children than his wife is. He is willing to do what he can for them, but he is more apt to realize what mother love is blind to,--that the average child is unappreciative of the parents' efforts and takes them for granted. The man is more apt to think and say, "Let them stand on their own feet and make their own way; it will do them good." The mother usually longs to spare her children struggle, the father rarely shares this desire except in a mild way.

It may be that there was a time when cla.s.ses were more fixed, that poverty had less of humiliation and blocked desire than it has at present. That society of all grades is restless with the desire for luxury seems without doubt. How profoundly the psychology of the ma.s.ses is being altered by education, by the newspaper, the magazine, the movie, the automobile, the fashion changes that make a dress obsolete in a season and above all the department store and the alluring advertis.e.m.e.nt, no one can hope to even estimate. Modern capitalism reaps great wealth by developing the luxurious, the spendthrift tastes of the poor. It would be a peculiar poetic justice that will make that development into the basis of revolution.

The women of the poor are perhaps even more restless than the men. In fact, it is the women that set the pace in these matters. This is because to woman has fallen the spending of the family funds, a fact of great importance in bringing about discord in the house. As the shopper the poor woman now sees the beautiful things that her ancestors knew nothing of, since there were no department stores in those days. To-day desires are awakened that cannot be fulfilled; she sees other women buying what she can only long for, and an active discontent with her lot appears.

Unphilosophical this, and severely to be deprecated as unworthy of woman. This has been done so often and so effectively(?) by divines, reformers, press, that a mere physician begs leave to remark that it is a natural sequence of the publicity luxury to-day has. _The most successful commercial minds of America are in a conspiracy against the poor Housewife to make her discontented with her lot by increasing her desires_; they are on the job day and night and invade every corner of her world; well, they have succeeded. The divines, etc., who thunder against luxury have no word to say against the department store and the advertising manager.

CHAPTER VII

THE HOUSEWIFE AND HER HUSBAND

The husband differs from the wife in this fundamental,--that essentially he is not a house man as she is a house woman. For the man the home is the place where he houses his family and where he rests at night. Here also he spends his leisure time in amount varying with his domesticity.

Man writes songs and books about the home, but the woman lives there.

Perhaps that is why women have not written sentimental verse about it.

Marriage is variously regarded. "It is a sacrament, a religious sanction, and not to be dissolved by anything but Death." So say a very large group of our people. "It is a contract, governed by law, entered into under certain conditions and to be dissolved only by law." This is the att.i.tude of practically all the governments of the world and rapidly is becoming the dominant point of view. Though the religious combat this conception of marriage, no marriage is legal on religious sanction alone, and the increase of divorce among those claiming to be Catholics is an undisputed fact.

It is only in the last century that the contract side of marriage has been emphasized and become dominant. There has resulted a conflict between the sacramental, sacred point of view and the secular. This conflict, like all other social conflicts, is a part of the inner life of most of the men and women of this generation, influencing their att.i.tude toward marriage, the home, the mate.

For when we say a thing is part of the "spirit of the times" we mean merely that arising as a development of, or a change from, old ideas in the minds of leaders, it has become propagated among the ma.s.s. It has become part of their thought, incentive to their action, source of their energies.

Thus sentiment and religion proclaim the sacredness of marriage, its eternal nature, its indissolubility. The law a.s.serts it to be a civil relationship, to be made or unmade by law itself; experience teaches that if it is sacred, then sacredness includes folly, indiscretion, brutality, and crime. Therefore the marriage relationship has become a source of conflict for our times, with opposing champions shouting out their point of view, with books, the movies, the press, the stage, with daily experience adducing cases. The scene of conflict is in the moods and emotions of all of us.

This divided view is particularly the att.i.tude of women and becomes part of the neurosis of the housewife.

After all a woman does not marry an inst.i.tution; she marries a man with whom she lives, sharing his life. In the natural course of events she becomes the mother of the children to whom he is father. We may dismiss as nonimportant the occasional freak marriage where a man and woman live apart, have no children and meet occasionally,--for obvious purposes.

Such a marriage is not only sterile biologically, not only empty of the virtues of marriage, but encounters none of its difficulties.

This intimate individual relationship makes marriage when complete and successful the happiest human experience. Soberly speaking, it is then the flower of existence, satisfying biologically and humanly, giving peace and satisfaction to body and mind. This is the ideal, the "happy ending" at which most romances, novels, plays, and all the daydreams of youth leave us. Warm, cozy, intense domesticity, where pa.s.sion is legitimate and love and friendship eternal; where children play around the hearth fire; of which death only is the ending!

This ideal is not realized largely because no ideal is. How often is it closely approximated? Experience says seldom. That implies no reproach against marriage, for we are to judge marriage by the rest of life and not by an ideal. A world in which great wars occur frequently, in which economic conflict is constant, in which sickness and disaster are never absent; where education is occasional, where reason has yet to rule in the larger policies and where folly occupies the high places,--why expect marriage to be more nearly perfect than the life of which it is a part? To be reasonably comfortable and happy in marriage is all we may expect.

What are the difficulties confronting the partners which impede happiness and especially which bring the neurosis of the housewife? For after all we can only examine the field for our own purpose.

We may divide the difficulties as follows from the standpoint of the neurosis of the housewife:

1. Those that arise from the s.e.x relationship itself.

2. Those that arise from conflicts of will, purpose, ideas.

3. Those that arise from the types of husbands.

4. Those that arise from the types of wives. (This has already been considered under the heading Types Predisposed to the Neurosis.)

Before we go on to the consideration of these various factors we must repeat what has been emphasized frequently in this book.

That the change in the status of woman implies difficulty in the marriage relationship. If only _one_ will is expected to be dominant in the household, the man's, then there can arise no conflict. If the form of the household is unaltered, but if the woman demands its control or expects equality, then conflict arises. If a woman expects a man to beat her at his pleasure, as has everywhere been the case and still is in some places, if she considers it just, brutality exists only in extremes of violence. If she considers a blow, or even a rough word, an unendurable insult, then brutality arises with the commonest disagreement. In other words, it is comparatively easy to deal with a woman expecting an inferior position, whose individual tastes, wills, ideas, and ideals have never been developed,--the ancient woman; it is very much more difficult to deal with her modern sister.

Happily the day is pa.s.sing when prudery governed the discussion of s.e.x.

Lewdness exists in concealment, suggestion is more provocatory than frankness. The morbidness of men who condemned themselves to celibacy has influenced the world; their fear of s.e.x led to a misguided silence shrouding the wrecks of many a life.