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