To those familiar with the conception that every emotion, every feeling, needs a discharge, it will seem heretical when I say that the excessive discharge of emotion is harmful.  Freud finds the root of most nervous trouble in repressed emotion.  That is in part true, but it is also true that excessive emotionality is a high-grade injury, for emotional discharge is habit forming.  It becomes habitual to cry too much, to act too angry, to fear too much.  The conquest and disciplining of emotion is one of the great objects of training.  It has for its goal the supremacy of the noblest organ of the human being, his brain.  For proper living there must be emotion—­there always will be—­but it must be tempered with intelligence if the best good of the individual and the race is to be reached.

The type of woman we must now study is a very modern product, the non-domestic type.

That the great majority of women have a maternal instinct does not nullify the fact that a small number have none whatever.  One of the facts of life, not taken into account with a fraction of its true significance and importance, is the variability of the race, the wide range of abilities, instincts, emotions, aspirations, and tastes.  A quality is said to be normal when the majority of the group possess it, but it may be utterly lacking in a smaller number who are thereby declared abnormal.

At present, it is normal for woman to be domestic, i.e. to yearn for husband, home, and children; to want to be a housewife.  Unfortunately, all these yearnings do not hang closely together, and a woman may want a husband and be swept by her own desire and opportunity into matrimony, and yet she may “detest” children, may dislike the housekeeping activities of marriage.  The sex and other instincts upon which marriage is based are not always linked with the maternal and home-keeping instincts.

While this has probably always been true, it mattered little in olden days.  A woman regarded the home as her destiny and generally had experienced no other life.  But as was shown in the first chapter, industry and feminism have given woman a taste of other kinds of life and have developed her individual points of character and abilities.  Perhaps she has been the bookkeeper of a large concern; or the private secretary to a man of exciting affairs; or she has been the buyer for some house; or she has dabbled in art or literature; or she has been a factory girl mingling with hundreds of others, working hard, but in a large group; or a saleslady in a department store,—­and domestic life is expected of her as if she had been trained for it.  In fact, she has been trained away from it.

The novelists delight to tell us of the woman who seeks a career and enters the struggle of her profession and fails.  And then there comes, just when her failure is greatest and she is most weepingly feminine, the patient hero, and he holds out his arms, and she slips into them, oh, so joyously!  She now has a home, and will be happy—­long row of asterisks, and have children; and if it is a movie, a year or more elapses and we are permitted to gaze upon a charming domestic scene.