The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

illegal prostitution in the United States and England, in

addition to the enormous amount of clandestine relationships, are

a sufficient commentary on the results. The increasing divorce

rate, the feminist movement, the legalizing of the “illegitimate”

child in Norway and Sweden and the almost certain arrival of

similar laws in all countries indicate a softer attitude toward

sex restrictions. The rapidly increasing age of marriage means

simply that continence will be more and more difficult, for I am

not one of those who believe that the repression of this vital

instinct is without harm. Continence is socially necessary, but

beyond a certain age it is physically and mentally harmful. Man

is thus placed on the horns of a dilemma from which it will take

the greatest wisdom and the finest humanity to extricate him. But

I cannot lay claim to any part of the knowledge and ability

necessary to formulate the plan. Let us at least be candid; let

us not say grandiloquently that the sexual urge can be

indefinitely repressed without harm to the average individual. We

may safely assert that there are people, men and women both, to

whom the sex impulses are vague and of little force, but to the

great majority, at least of men, sex desire is almost a hunger,

and unsatisfied it brings about a restlessness and

dissatisfaction that enters into all the mental life. On what

basis society will meet this situation I do not pretend to know,

but this is certain,—that all over the civilized world there is

apparent an organizing rebellion against the social impediment to

sexual satisfaction.

For it must be remembered that sexual satisfaction is not alone

naked desire. It is that—but sublimated into finer things as

well. It is the desire for stability of affection, for a

sympathetic beloved, an outlet for emotion, a longing for

respectable unitary status. The unit of respectable human life is

the married couple; the girl wants that social recognition, and

so does her man. Both yearn to cast off from their old homes and

start a new one, as an initial step in successful living. The

thought of children—a little form in a little bed, and the man

and woman gazing in an ecstasy of pride and affection upon

it—makes all other pleasures seem unworthy and gives to the ache

for intimacy a high moral sanction.

This brings us to the point where we must consider those

characteristics that make up domesticity and homekeeping. Early

impressions and the consistent teaching of literature, stage,

press and religion have given to the home a semi-sacred

character, which is one of the great components of the desire to

marry, especially for women. The home is, in the minds of most of

those who enter into marriage, a place owned, peculiarly

possessed, and it offers freedom from the restraints of society

and the inhibitions of ceremony and custom. Both the man and

woman like to think that here is the place where their love can

find free expression, where she will care for him and he will

provide for her, and where their children can grow in beauty,

intelligence and moral worth under their guidance. But this is

only the sentimental side of their thought, the part they give

freest expression to because it is most respectable and “nice.”

In the background of their minds is the desire for ownership, the

wish to say, “This is mine and here I rule.” Into that comes the

ideal that the stability of society is involved and the

homekeeper is its most important citizen, but when we study the

real evolution of the home, study the laws pertaining to the

family, we find that the husband and father had a little kingdom

with wife and children as subjects, and that only gradually has

there come from that monarchical idea the more democratic

conception cherished to-day.

Men and women may be considered as domestic or non-domestic. The

domestic type of man is ordinarily “steady” in purpose and

absorbed more in work than in the seeking of pleasure, is either

strongly inhibited sexually or else rather easily satisfied;

cherishes the ideal of respectability highly; is conventional and

habituated, usually has a strong property feeling and is apt to

have a decided paternal feeling. He may of course be seclusive

and apt to feel the constraints of contact with others as

wearying and unsatisfactory; he is not easily bored or made

restless. All this is a broad sketch; even the most domestic find

in the home a certain amount of tyranny and monotony; they yearn

now and then for adventure and new romance and think of the

freedom of their bachelor days with regret over their passing.

They may decide that married home life is best, but the choice is

not without difficulty and is accompanied by an irrepressible,

though hidden dissatisfaction. On the whole, however, the

domestic man finds the home a haven of relief and a source of

pleasurable feeling.

The non-domestic man may be of a dozen types. Perhaps he is

incurably romantic and hates the thought of settling down and

putting away for good the search for the perfect woman. Perhaps

he is uninhibted sexually or overexcitable in this respect, and

is therefore restless and unfaithful. He may be bored by

monotony, a restless seeker of new experiences and new work,

possessed by the devils of wanderlust. He may be an egoist

incapable of the continuous self-sacrifice and self-abnegation

demanded by the home,—quarrelsome and selfish. Sometimes he is

wedded to an ideal of achievement or work and believes that he

travels best who travels alone. Often in these days of late

marriage he has waited until he could “afford” to marry and then

finds that his habits chain him to single life. Or he may be an

unconventional non-believer in the home and marriage, though

these are really rare. The drinker, the roue, the wanderer, the

selfish, the nonconventional, the soarer, the restless, the

inefficient and the misogynist all make poor husbands and fathers

and find the home a burden too crippling to be borne.

One of the outstanding figures of the past is the domestic woman,

yearning for a home, assiduously and constantly devoted to it,

her husband and her numerous children. Fancy likes to linger on

this old-fashioned housewife, arising in the early morning and

from that time until her bedtime content to bake, cook, wash,

dust, clean, sew, nurse and teach; imagining no other career

possible or proper for her sex; leading a life of self-sacrifice, toil and devotion. Poet, novelist, artist, and

clergyman have immortalized her, and men for the most part

cherish this type as their mother and dream of it as the ideal

wife.

Perhaps (and probably) this woman rebelled in her heart against

her drudgery and dreamed of better things; perhaps she regretted

the quickly past youth and dreaded the frequent child-bearing.

Whether she did or not, the appearance of a strongly non-domestic

type is part of the history of the latter nineteenth century and

the early twentieth.

The non-domestic women are, like their male prototypes, of many

kinds, and it would be idle to enumerate them. There is the kind

of woman that “has a career,” using this term neither

sarcastically nor flatteringly. The successful artist of whatever

sort—painter, musician, actress—has usually been quite spoiled

for domesticity by the reward of money and adulation given her.

Nowhere is the lack of proportion of our society so well

demonstrated as in the hysterical praise given to this kind of

woman, and naturally she cannot consent to the subordination and

seclusion of the home. Then there is the young business woman,

efficient, independent, proud of her place in the bustle and stir

of trade. She is quite willing to marry and often makes an

admirable mother and wife, but sometimes she finds the menial

character of housework, its monotony and dependence too much for

her. The feminist aglow with equality and imbued with too vivid a

feeling of sex antagonism may marry and bear children, but she

rarely becomes a fireside companion of the type the average man

idealizes. Then the vain, the frivolous, the sexually

uncontrolled,—these too make poor choice for him who has set his

heart on a wife who will cook his meals, darn his stockings and

care for the children. To be non-domestic is a privilege or a

right we cannot deny to women, nor is there condemnation in the

term,—it is merely a summary characterization.

Though to remain single is to be freer than to be married and

domestic, yet the race will always have far more domestic

characters. These alone will bear children, and from them the

racial characters will flow rather than from the exceptional and

deviate types, unless the home disappears in the form of some

other method of raising children. After all, the home is a

costly, inefficient method of family life unless it has

advantages for childhood. This it decidedly has, though we have

bad homes aplenty and foolish ones galore. Yet there is for the

child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender

feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred

principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of

consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only

real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there

found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we

see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when

we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free

from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home.

But we must be realistic, as well as idealistic. A silent or

noisy struggle goes on in the home between the old and the new,

between a rising and a receding generation. An orthodox old

generation looks askance on an heretical new generation; parents

who believe that to play cards or go to theater is the way of

Satan find their children leaving home to do these very things.

Everywhere mothers wonder why daughters like short skirts, powder

and perhaps rouge, when they were brought up on the corset,

crinoline and the bustle; and they rebel against the indictment

passed out broadcast by their children. “You are old-fashioned;

this is the year 1921.” When children grow up, their wills clash

with their parents’, even in the sweetest, and most loving of

homes. Behind many a girl’s anxiety to marry is the desire for

the unobstructed exercise of her will. Parents too often seek in

their children a continuation of their own peculiarities, their

own characters and ideals, forgetting that the continuity of the

generations is true only in a biological sense, but in no other

way. And children grown to strength, power and intelligence think

that each person must seek his experiences himself and forget

that true wisdom lies in what is accepted by all the generations.

Just as we have the types of husbands and the types of wives, so

we judge men and women by the wisdom, dignity and faithfulness of

their parenthood; so we judge them by the kind of children they

are to their parents. In this last we have a point in character

of great importance and one upon which the followers of Freud

have laid much—over-much—stress.

The effect of too affectionate a home training, too assertive

parenthood, is to dwarf the individuality of the child and make

him a sort of parasite, out of contact with his contemporaries,

seclusive and odd. There is a certain brand of goody-goody boy,

brought up tied to his mother’s apron strings, who has lost the

essential capacities of mixing with varied types of boys and

girls, who is sensitive, shy and retiring, or who is naively

boorish and unschooled in tact. According to some psychiatrists

this kind of training breeds the mental