the press thunder against it. It is even against the law for
a physician or other person to instruct in the methods of birth
restriction, and yet--the birth rate steadily drops. An immigrant mother
has six, eight, or ten children and her daughter has one, two, or three,
very rarely more, and often enough none. This is true even of races
close to religious teaching, such as the Irish Catholic and the Jew.

One can well be cynical of the power of religion and teaching and law
when one finds that even the families of ministers, rabbis, editors, and
lawmakers, all of whom stand publicly for natural birth, have shown a
great reduction in their size, that has taken place in a single
generation.

Is the modern woman more susceptible to the effects of pregnancy,--less
resistant to the strain of childbearing and childbirth? It is a quite
general impression amongst obstetricians that this is a fact and also
that fewer women are able to nurse their babies. If so, these phenomena
are of the highest importance to the race and likewise to the problem of
the new housewife. For we shall learn that the lowering of energy is
both a cause and symptom of her neuroses.

If then we summarize what has been thus far outlined, we find two
currents in the evolution of the housewife. _First_, she has yielded a
large part of her work to the factory, practically all of that part of
it which is industrial and a considerable portion of the food
preparation.

_Second_, there has been a rise in the dignity and position of woman in
the past one hundred and fifty years which has had many results. She has
considerably widened the scope of her experience with life through work
in the factory, in the office, in the schoolhouse, and in the
professions. This has changed her attitude toward her original
occupation of housewife and is a psychological fact of great importance.
She has become more industrial and individualized, and as a result has
declined to live in unsatisfactory relations with man, so that divorce
has become more frequent. In part this is also caused by her inability
to give up petty irresponsibility while claiming equality. Finally, the
declining birth rate is still further evidence of her individualization
and is in a sense her denial of mere femaleness and an affirmation of
freedom.

CHAPTER II

THE NATURE OF "NERVOUSNESS"

Preliminary to our discussion of the nervousness of the housewife we
must take up without great regar