“I’d love to go out with you,” wails this housewife, “but there’s something I must finish to-day.”  The word must, self-imposed, becomes the mania of her life, to the open rebellion of her household.  The word drives her to the real neglect of her husband, who becomes irritated at her constant and to him needless activity, coupled with her complaints.

“Why don’t you rest if you are tired,” is his stock remonstrance; “the house looks all right to me.”

But it is futile.  She becomes irritated, perhaps cries and says, “Just like a man.  It’s clean to you if there are no cobwebs on the walls.”

Whereupon the debate closes, but the woman is the more deenergized and the man exasperated at the unreasonableness of women in general and his wife in particular.

It is probably true that woman has more conscience, in so far as detail is concerned, than man.  She is more of a lover of order and neatness, more wedded to decorum.  Man loves comfort and his interest is more specialized and analytical, and as a rule he hates fussiness.

This hatred of fussiness makes him long for the masculine clubroom, gives him the kind of uneasiness that sends him off on a fishing trip or hunting expedition.  Further, and this is of great social importance, many a broken home, many an unexplainable triangle of the Wife, the Husband, and the Other Woman owes its existence, not to the charms of the other woman, but to the overconscientious wife.

The third type predisposed to the neurosis of the housewife is the overemotional woman.

We have already considered the effect of certain types of emotion on health and endurance and may formulate it as follows:  Emotion may act as a great bodily disturbance, affecting every organ and every function of the body.  What we call nervousness is largely made up of abnormal emotional response, of persistent emotion, of the blocking of energy by emotion.

Now people differ from the very start of life in their response to situations.  One baby, if he does not get what he wants, turns his attention to something else, and another will cry for hours or until he gets it.  One will manifest anger and strike at being blocked or impeded in his desires, and the other will implore and plead in a baby way for his wish.

In the face of difficulties one man shows fear and worry, another acts hastily and without premeditation, a third flares up in what we call a fighting spirit and seeks to batter down the resistance, and still a fourth becomes very active mentally, calling upon all of his past experience and seeking a definite plan to gain his end.

A loss, a deprivation, plunges one type of person into deepest sorrow, a helpless sorrow, inert and symbolic of the hopeless frustration of love.  The same affliction striking at another man’s heart makes him deeply and soberly reflective, and out of it there ensues a great philanthropy, a great memorial to his grief.  For the one, sorrow has deenergized; for the other it has energized, has raised the efforts to a nobler plane.