The Nervous Housewife

by Abraham Myerson

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.