The Future of Woman and Marriage : Part 4

The Nervous Housewife
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 16 of 16)

Alarmists are constantly raising the cry that marriage is declining and that society is thereby threatened at its very heart. There is the pessimist who feels that the "irreligion" of to-day is responsible; there is the one who blames feminism; and there is the type that finds in Democracy and liberalism generally the cause of the receding old-fashioned morality. Divorce, late marriage, and child-restriction are the manifestations of this decadence, and the press, the pulpit, science, and the State all have taken notice of these modern phenomena, though with widely differing attitudes.

That matrimony is changing cannot be questioned or denied. The main change is that woman is entering more and more as an equal partner whose rights the modern law recognizes as the ancient law did not. She is no longer to be classed as exemplified by the famous words of Petruchio, when he claimed his wife, the erstwhile shrew, as his property in exactly the same sense as any domestic animal, linking the wife with the horse, the cow, the ass, as the chattels of the man. The law agreed to this attitude of the man, the Church supported it; woman, strangely enough, seemed to glory in it.

With the rise of woman into the status of a human being (a revolution not yet accomplished in entirety) the property relationship weakened but lingers very strongly as a tradition that molds the lives of husband and wife. Women are still held more rigidly to their duties as wives than men to their duties as husbands, and the will of the husband still rules in the major affairs of life, even though in a thousand details the wife rules. Theoretically every man willingly acknowledges the importance of his wife as mother and homekeeper, but practically he acts as if his work were the really important activity of the family. The obedience of the wife is still asked for by most of the religious ceremonies of the times. Two great opinions are therefore still struggling in the home and in society; one that matrimony implies the dependence and essential inferiority of woman, and the other that the man and woman are equal partners in the relationship. I fully realize that the advocate of the first opinion will deny that the inferiority of woman is at all implied in their standpoint. But it is an inferior who vows obedience, it is the inferior who loses legal rights, it is the inferior who yields to another the "headship" of the home.

The struggle of these two opinions will have only one outcome, the complete victory of the modern belief that the sexes are, all in all, equal, and that therefore marriage is a contract of equals. Meanwhile the struggling opinions, with the scene of conflict in every home, in every heart, cause disorder as all struggles do. When the victory is complete, then conduct will be definite and clear-cut, then the home will be reorganized in relation to the new belief, and then new problems will arise and be met. How conduct will be changed, what the new problems will be and how they will be met, I do not pretend to know.

Meanwhile there is this to say, - that marriage should be guarded so that the grossly unfit do not marry. A thorough physical examination is as necessary for matrimony as it is for civil service, and many of the horrors every generation of doctors has witnessed could be eliminated at once and for all time.

Further, if marriage is a desirable state, and on the whole it must be preferred to a single existence, surely so long as our code of morals remains unchanged, and so long as we believe the race must be perpetuated, then the too late marriage should be discouraged. The ideal age for women to enter matrimony is from twenty-two to twenty-five; the ideal age for men is from twenty-five to twenty-eight. It is not my province to deal at length with this subject, but I may state that I believe that continence beyond these ages becomes increasingly difficult, that immorality is encouraged, that adaptability becomes lessened, and that wiser selection of mates does not occur. But how bring about early marriages in a time when the luxuries seem to have become necessities, and therefore the necessity of marriage is eyed more and more as an extravagance of the foolhardy? How bring about early marriage when women are earning pay almost equal to that of the men and are therefore more reluctant to enter matrimony unless at a high standard of living. The late marriage is an evil, but how it can be displaced by the early marriage under the present social scheme I do not see.

We have considered divorce before this. It is not an evil but a symptom of evil; not a disease in itself. It cannot be lessened or abolished unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another. We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another, according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace in one age is cruelty in the next, and this is a matter not of argument but of expectation and feeling.

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.

Boston
Little, Brown, And Company
1920