But alas for reel life as against real life!  We are not shown how she yearns for the activities of her old career; we are not shown the feeling she constantly has that she is too good for housekeeping.  If she has been fortunate enough to marry a rich and indulgent man, she becomes a dilettante in her work, playing with art or science.  If her first vocation was business, she is bored to death by domesticity.  But if she marries poverty, she looks on herself as a drudge, and though loyalty and pride may keep her from voicing her regrets, they eat like a canker worm in the bud,—­and we have the neurosis of this type of housewife.  Or else her experience in business makes her size up her husband more keenly, and we find her rebelling against his failure, criticizing him either openly to the point of domestic disharmony, or inwardly to her own disgust.

It is not meant that all business and professional women, all typists and factory girls are dissatisfied with marriage or develop an abnormal amount of neurosis.  Many a girl of this type really loves housekeeping, really loves children, and makes the ideal housewife.  Intelligent, clear-eyed, she manages her home like a business.  But if independent experience and a non-domestic nature happen to reside in the same woman, then the neurosis appears in full bloom.  Against the adulation given to women singers and actresses, against the fancied rewards of literature and business, the domestic lot seems drab to this non-domestic type.

Here the question arises:  Is there room in our society for matrimony and a business career?  That a large number of exceptional women have found it possible to be mothers, housewives, authors, and singers at one and the same time does not take away from the fact that in the majority of cases such a combination means either a childless marriage or the turning over of an occasional child to servants:  it means the abandonment of the home and the living in hotels, except in the few cases where there is wealth and trusty servants.  Wherever women who have children are poor and work in factories, there is the greatest infant mortality, there is the greatest amount of juvenile delinquency, and there is the greatest amount of marital difficulty.  Our present conception of matrimony demands that woman remains in the home until such time at least as her children are able to care largely for themselves.

In the history of the worst cases of the housewife’s neurosis one finds previously existing trouble, though, as I have before this emphasized, the neurosis may develop in the previously normal.  This previously existing trouble is the “nervous breakdown” in high school or in college, or in the factory and the office, though it must be said it occurs relatively less often in the latter places than the former.  This previous breakdown often appears as the direct result from emotional strain such as an unhappy love affair, or the fear of failure in examinations.  It may have followed acute illness, like influenza or pneumonia.  But the original temperament was nervous, high-strung, delicate; one learns of an appetite that disappeared easily, a sleep readily disturbed, in short, an easily lowered or obstructed output of energy.