Sex Characters and Domesticity : Part 5

The Foundations of Personality
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 19 of 22)

The non-domestic man may be of a dozen types. Perhaps he is incurably romantic and hates the thought of settling down and putting away for good the search for the perfect woman. Perhaps he is uninhibted sexually or over-excitable in this respect, and is therefore restless and unfaithful. He may be bored by monotony, a restless seeker of new experiences and new work, possessed by the devils of wanderlust. He may be an egoist incapable of the continuous self-sacrifice and self-abnegation demanded by the home, - quarrelsome and selfish. Sometimes he is wedded to an ideal of achievement or work and believes that he travels best who travels alone. Often in these days of late marriage he has waited until he could "afford" to marry and then finds that his habits chain him to single life. Or he may be an unconventional non-believer in the home and marriage, though these are really rare. The drinker, the roue, the wanderer, the selfish, the nonconventional, the soarer, the restless, the inefficient and the misogynist all make poor husbands and fathers and find the home a burden too crippling to be borne.

One of the outstanding figures of the past is the domestic woman, yearning for a home, assiduously and constantly devoted to it, her husband and her numerous children. Fancy likes to linger on this old-fashioned housewife, arising in the early morning and from that time until her bedtime content to bake, cook, wash, dust, clean, sew, nurse and teach; imagining no other career possible or proper for her sex; leading a life of self- sacrifice, toil and devotion. Poet, novelist, artist, and clergyman have immortalized her, and men for the most part cherish this type as their mother and dream of it as the ideal wife.

Perhaps (and probably) this woman rebelled in her heart against her drudgery and dreamed of better things; perhaps she regretted the quickly past youth and dreaded the frequent child-bearing. Whether she did or not, the appearance of a strongly non-domestic type is part of the history of the latter nineteenth century and the early twentieth.

The non-domestic women are, like their male prototypes, of many kinds, and it would be idle to enumerate them. There is the kind of woman that "has a career," using this term neither sarcastically nor flatteringly. The successful artist of whatever sort - painter, musician, actress - has usually been quite spoiled for domesticity by the reward of money and adulation given her. Nowhere is the lack of proportion of our society so well demonstrated as in the hysterical praise given to this kind of woman, and naturally she cannot consent to the subordination and seclusion of the home. Then there is the young business woman, efficient, independent, proud of her place in the bustle and stir of trade. She is quite willing to marry and often makes an admirable mother and wife, but sometimes she finds the menial character of housework, its monotony and dependence too much for her. The feminist aglow with equality and imbued with too vivid a feeling of sex antagonism may marry and bear children, but she rarely becomes a fireside companion of the type the average man idealizes. Then the vain, the frivolous, the sexually uncontrolled, - these too make poor choice for him who has set his heart on a wife who will cook his meals, darn his stockings and care for the children. To be non-domestic is a privilege or a right we cannot deny to women, nor is there condemnation in the term, - it is merely a summary characterization.

Though to remain single is to be freer than to be married and domestic, yet the race will always have far more domestic characters. These alone will bear children, and from them the racial characters will flow rather than from the exceptional and deviate types, unless the home disappears in the form of some other method of raising children. After all, the home is a costly, inefficient method of family life unless it has advantages for childhood. This it decidedly has, though we have bad homes aplenty and foolish ones galore. Yet there is for the child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home.

But we must be realistic, as well as idealistic. A silent or noisy struggle goes on in the home between the old and the new, between a rising and a receding generation. An orthodox old generation looks askance on an heretical new generation; parents who believe that to play cards or go to theater is the way of Satan find their children leaving home to do these very things. Everywhere mothers wonder why daughters like short skirts, powder and perhaps rouge, when they were brought up on the corset, crinoline and the bustle; and they rebel against the indictment passed out broadcast by their children. "You are old-fashioned; this is the year 1921." When children grow up, their wills clash with their parents', even in the sweetest, and most loving of homes. Behind many a girl's anxiety to marry is the desire for the unobstructed exercise of her will. Parents too often seek in their children a continuation of their own peculiarities, their own characters and ideals, forgetting that the continuity of the generations is true only in a biological sense, but in no other way. And children grown to strength, power and intelligence think that each person must seek his experiences himself and forget that true wisdom lies in what is accepted by all the generations.

Just as we have the types of husbands and the types of wives, so we judge men and women by the wisdom, dignity and faithfulness of their parenthood; so we judge them by the kind of children they are to their parents. In this last we have a point in character of great importance and one upon which the followers of Freud have laid much - over-much - stress.

The effect of too affectionate a home training, too assertive parenthood, is to dwarf the individuality of the child and make him a sort of parasite, out of contact with his contemporaries, seclusive and odd. There is a certain brand of goody-goody boy, brought up tied to his mother's apron strings, who has lost the essential capacities of mixing with varied types of boys and girls, who is sensitive, shy and retiring, or who is naively boorish and unschooled in tact. According to some psychiatrists this kind of training breeds the mental disease known as Dementia Praecox, but I seriously doubt it. One often finds that the goody-goody boy of fifteen becomes the college fullback at twenty, - that is, once thrown on the world, the really normal get back their birthright of character. I think it likely that now and then a feeling of inferiority is bred in this way, a feeling that may cling and change the current of a boy's life. The real danger of too close a family life, in whatever way it manifests itself, is that it cuts into real social life, narrows the field of influences and sympathies, breeds a type of personality of perhaps good morals but of poor humanity.

The home must never lose its contact with the world; it should never be regarded as the real world for which a man works. It is a place to rest in, to eat in, to work in; in it is the spirit of family life, redolent of affection, mutual aid and self-sacrifice; but more than these, it is the nodal point of affections, concerns and activity which radiate from it to the rest of the world.