Not all hysteria, either in men or women, is united with such a character as this woman’s.  Sufficient stress and strain may bring about hysterical symptoms in a relatively normal person and short hysterical reactions are common in the normal woman.  The height of cynicism may be found in the discovery that war causes hysteria in some men in much the same way that matrimony causes hysteria in some women.  A humorous review of a paper on the domestic neuroses was entitled “Kitchen Shell Shock.”  But severe hysteria, when it arises in the housewife, springs mainly from her disposition and not from the kitchen.

Case X. The unfaithful husband.

Monogamous marriage is based upon the assumption that loyalty to a single male is moral and possible.  It is probable that in no age has this agreement been loyally carried out by the husbands; it is probable that in our own time the single standard of morals has first been strongly emphasized.  With the rise of women into equality one of the important demands they have made is that men remain as loyal as themselves.  Therefore the reaction to unchastity or unfaithfulness on the part of the man is apt to be more severe than in the past, on the theory that where more is demanded failure in performance is felt the keener.

The housewife, Mrs. F.C., aged thirty-five, is a prepossessing woman, the mother of two children, and has been married for nine years.  Her health has always been fairly good, though in the last four years she has been somewhat irritable.  She attributed this to struggle to make both ends meet, her husband being a workman with wages just over the border line of sufficiency.  They quarreled “no more than other couples do”, were as much in love “as other couples are”, to use her phrases.  She was above her class in education, read what are usually called advanced books, was “strong for suffrage”, etc.  However she was a good housekeeper, devoted to her children and faithful to her husband.  Their sexual relations were normal and up till six months before I saw her she thought herself a well-mated, rather fortunate woman.

Out of a clear sky came proof of long-continued unfaithfulness on the part of her “domestic” husband:  a chance bill for women’s clothes fluttered out of his pocket and under the bed, so that next morning she found it; an unbelieving moment and then a visit to the address on the bill, and proof plenty that he had been disloyal, not only to her but to the children, who had been obliged to scrimp along while he helped maintain another woman.  Humiliated beyond measure by her disaster, unable to endure her past memories of happiness and faith, with an unstable world rocking before her, through the revelation that a quiet, contented, loving man could be completely false, she found no adequate reason for living and became a helpless prey to her troubled mind.  “A temporary unfaithfulness, a yielding to sudden temptation” she could understand, but a determined plan of duplicity shattered her whole scheme of values.  A very severe psychoneurosis followed, and her children and she were taken over by her parents and cared for.