Which means that the woman who takes up wifehood as a profession has
no social morality. Her husband is her oyster and the world must in
turn be her husband's oyster. She knows only one thing: that she must
support her mate in anything he does so long as his activities, be they
even immoral or criminal, provide food and shelter for her and her
children. She cares not what he does as long as he "succeeds."
She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting
"theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is
a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to
capture and rob.
She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time,
is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She
would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her
mate.
The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and
thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will
thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness
to stand by him in crooked deals.
=Health Versus Sickness.= To the old fashioned wife, weakness and
sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and
capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time,
a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation
became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from
many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she
was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional
women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never
seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct
fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity,
she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of
woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean."
The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns
the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to
neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters
and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect
her.
From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with
Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine
and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five
out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and
expectation of pain."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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