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 role 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.