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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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