Reaction to the Disagreeable : Part 2

The Nervous Housewife
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 6 of 16)

Is the maternal instinct waning in intensity in this period of feminization? There have always been some bad, careless, selfish mothers; has their number increased? Probably not, yet the maternal instinct now has competition in the heart of the modern woman. The desire to participate in the world's activity, the desire to learn, to acquire culture, engenders a restless impatience with the closed-in life of the mother-housewife. This interferes with single-minded motherhood, brings about conflict, and so leads to mental and bodily unrest. Of course this interferes little or not at all with some, probably most of the present-day mothers, but is a factor of importance in the lives of many.

The nervous housewife has several difficulties in her relations to her children. These are of importance in understanding her and have been touched on before this, but it will be of advantage to consider them as a group.

We have said that the opinion of obstetricians is that the modern woman has more difficulty in delivering herself than did her ancestress. If this is true (and we may be dealing with the fact that obstetricians are often the ones to see the difficult cases, or that these stand out in their memories) there are several explanations.

First, women marry later than they did. It may be said that the first child is easiest born before the mother is twenty-five years of age, and that from that time on a first child is born with rapidly increasing difficulty. The pelvis, like all the bony-joint structures of the body, loses plasticity with years, and plasticity is the prime need for childbearing. Similarly with the uterus, which is of course a muscular organ, but possesses an elastic force that diminishes as the woman grows older.

Second, the vigor of the uterine contractions upon which the passage of the baby depends is controlled largely by the so-called sympathetic nervous system, though glands throughout the body are very important factors as well. This part of the nervous system and these glands are part of the mechanism of emotion as well as of childbearing, and emotion plays a rôle of importance in childbearing. The modern woman fears

childbearing as her ancestress did not, partly through greater knowledge, partly through her divided attitude towards life.

Having a harder time in childbearing means a slower convalescence, a need for more rest and care. Then nursing becomes somehow more difficult, more wearing to the mother; she rebels more against it, and yet, knowing its importance, she tries to "keep her milk." It often seems that the more women know about nursing, the less able they are to nurse, that the ignorant slum-dweller who nurses the child each time it cries and drinks beer to furnish milk does better than her enlightened sister who nurses by the clock and drinks milk as a source of her baby's supply.

The feeling of great responsibility for her child's welfare that the modern woman has acquired, as a result of popular education in these matters, undoubtedly saves infants' lives and is therefore worth the price. A secondary result of importance, and one not good, is the added liability to fatigue and breakdown that the mother acquires. This factor we meet again in the next phase of our subject, the education and training of children.

Though the number of children has conspicuously decreased, the care and attention given them has increased in inverse proportion. The woman with six children or more turned over the younger children to the older ones, so that her burden, though heavy, was much less than it may seem. Further, though she loved and cared for them, she knew far less of hygiene than her descendant; she did not try to bring them up in a germless way; and her household activities kept her too busy to allow her to notice each running nose, or each "festering sore." Not having nearly so much knowledge of disease, she had much less fear and was spared this type of deënergization. Her daughter views with alarm each cough and sneeze, has sinister forebodings with each rash; pays an enormous attention to the children's food, and through an increasing attention to detail in her child's life and actions has a greater liability to break under the greater responsibility and conscientiousness.

It must be remembered that the feeling of responsibility and apprehensive attention is not merely "mental." It means fatigue, more disturbance of appetite, and less restful sleep. These are things of great importance in causing nervousness; in fact, they constitute a large part of it.

Perhaps another generation will find that hygiene can be taught without producing fussiness and fear. Certainly popular education has its value, but it has a morbid side that now needs attention. This morbid side is not only bad for the mother but is unqualifiedly bad for the child.

For the child of to-day, the center of the family stage in his attention, is often either spoiled or made neurasthenic by his treatment. Either he is frankly indulged, or else an over-critical attitude is taken toward him. "Bad habits must not be formed" is the actuating motive of the overconscientious parents, for they do not seem to know that the "trial and error" method is the natural way of learning. Children take up one habit after another for the sake of experience and discard them by themselves. For a child to lie, to steal, to fight, to be selfish, to be self-willed is not at all unnatural; for him to have bad table manners and to forget admonition in general and against these manners in particular is his birthright, so to speak.

Yet many a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and thence into a vicious character.

Especially is this true of the overæsthetic, overconscientious types described in Chapter III. I have seen women who made the dinner table less a place to eat than a place where a child was pilloried for his manners, - pilloried into sullen, appetiteless state.

So, too, an unfortunate publicity given to child prodigies brought with it for a short time an epidemic of forced intellectual feeding of children, that produced only a precocious neurasthenia as its great result. Similarly the Montessori method of child training which made every woman into a kindergarten teacher did a hundred times more harm than good, despite the merits of the system. That a child needs to experiment with life himself means that it will be a long time before the average mother will know how to help him.

Boston
Little, Brown, And Company
1920