The Nervous Housewife

by Abraham Myerson

How much harm the romantic tales have done to marriage and the sober-satisfying everyday life, no one can estimate, no one can overestimate. Romanticism, which extols sex as the prime and only thing of life, prudery which closes its eyes to it and makes sour faces, need special places in Dante's Inferno. Neither has dealt with reality,—reality, which is satisfying and pleasant unless examined with the prejudices instilled by the hypersexual romance writer and the perverted sexuality of the prude.

Nevertheless that two people brought up entirely differently, and having different attitudes towards love and life, should come into sharp conflict is to be expected. Further, that disillusionment follows after the excitement and heightened expectation of courtship is inevitable. Marriage at the best includes a settlement to routine; it carries with it an adjustment to reality, a getting down to earth that is painful and disappointing to minds fed to expect thrill and passion with each moment.

The idealization of the mate—the man or woman—gives way to a gradually increasing knowledge of imperfection and common clay. Common sense, earnestness of purpose, willingness to adjust, and a sense of humor save the situation and change the love of the engaged period into a more solid, robust affection which gains in durability and wearing quality what it loses in intensity.

Unfortunately, in many cases to a great extent and in all to some extent, there arises dissension natural wherever two human beings meet on anything like equal terms.

In times past (and in many countries at the present time), the patriarchal household prevailed. The Head of the House was the father, a sovereign either stern or indulgent according to his nature. Perhaps his wife ruled him through his love for her, as women have ruled from the beginning of things, but if she did it was not by right but by privilege.

America has changed all that, so say all native and foreign observers. Here the woman rules; here she drags her husband after her like a tail to a kite; here she is mistress and he obeys, though nominally still head of the household. All the humorists emphasize this, and the novelist depicts it as the common situation. The husband is represented as yoked to the wheel of his wife's whims, tyrannized over by the one he works for.

This is surely a gross exaggeration, though it furnishes excellent material for satire. The man still makes the main conditions of life for both; his name is taken, his work sustains the household, his purse supplies the means of existence, his industrial business situation determines the residence, his social standing is theirs. This does not prevent him from being "henpecked" in many cases, but on the whole it assures his superior status.

Nevertheless it is true that the American woman of whatever origin has a will of her own as no other woman has. Since the expression of will is one of the chief sources of human pleasures, one of the chief, most persistent activities, man and wife enter into a contest for supremacy in the household. It may be settled quietly and without even recognizing its existence, on the common plan that the woman shall have charge of the home and the man of his business; it may rage with violence over the fundamental as well as the trivial things of home. After all, it is not the importance of a thing that determines the size of the row it may raise; men have killed each other over a nickel because defeat over even this trifle was intolerable.

What are the chief sources of conflict? For to name them all would be simply to name every possible source of difference of opinion that exists. Let us take as an example Extravagance.

This is a new development. In the former days the bulk of purchases was made by the husband, in whose hands the purse strings were tightly clutched. With the growth of the cities and industry, the development of the department store and rise of shopping as an institution, the man gave place to his wife largely because industry would not let him off during the daytime. So the housewife disbursed most of the funds of her home,—and there arose one of the fiercest and most persistent of domestic conflicts.