But with the entrance of woman into many varied professions and occupations, with a wider access to experience and knowledge, arose what may be called the era of the “individualization of woman.”  For if any group of people are kept under more or less uniform conditions in early life, if one goal is held out as the only legitimate aim and end, in a word, if their training and purposes are made alike, they become alike and individuality never develops.  With individuality comes rebellion at old-established conditions, dissatisfaction, discontent, and especially if the old ideal still remains in force.  This new type of woman is not so well fitted for the old type of marriage as her predecessors.  There arises a group of consequences based psychologically on this, a fact which we shall find of great importance later on.

Women still regard marriage as their chief goal in life, still enter homes, still bear children, and take their husband’s name.  But having become more individualized they demand more definite individual treatment and rebel more at what they consider an infringement of their rights as human beings.  Also, and unfortunately, they still wish the right to be whimsical, they continue to reserve for themselves the weapons of tears, reproaches, and unreasonable demands.  This has brought about the divorce evil.

Briefly the “divorce” evil arises first from the rebellion of woman against marital drunkenness, unfaithfulness, neglect, brutality that a former generation of wives tolerated and even expected.  Second, it arises from a conflict between the institution of marriage which still carries with it the chattel idea—­that woman is property—­and a generation of women that does not accept this.  Third, it arises from the ill-balanced demands of women to be treated as equals and also as irresponsible, petty, and indulged tyrants.  Men are unable to adjust themselves to the shattering of the romantic ideal, and the home disintegrates.  Though divorce is the top of the crest of marital unhappiness, it really represents only the extreme cases, and behind it is a huge body of quarreling and divided homes.

We shall later see that our Nervous Housewife has symptoms and pains and aches and changes in mood and feeling that are born of the conflict that is in part pictured by divorce. Divorce is a manifestation of the discontent of women, and so is the nervousness of the housewife.

There arises as a result of this individualization of woman, as a result of increasing physiological knowledge, the hugely important fact of restricted child bearing.  The woman will no longer bear children indiscriminately,—­and the large family is soon to be a thing of the past in America and in all the civilized world.  The-woman-that-knows-how shrinks from the long nine months of pregnancy, the agony of the birth, and the weary restricted months of nursing.  Had the woman of a past time known how, she too would have refused to bear.  In this the housewife of to-day is seconded by her husband, for where he has sympathy for his wife he prefers to let her decide the number of children, and also he is impressed by the high cost of rearing them.