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.

One gets cynical about the influence of church, patriotism, and press
when one sees how the housewife has disregarded these influences. For
all the religions preach that race suicide is a sin, all the statesmen
point out that only decadent nations restrict families, and all or
nearly all 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.