either openly to the point of domestic disharmony, or inwardly to her
own disgust.

It is not meant that all business and professional women, all typists
and factory girls are dissatisfied with marriage or develop an abnormal
amount of neurosis. Many a girl of this type really loves housekeeping,
really loves children, and makes the ideal housewife. Intelligent,
clear-eyed, she manages her home like a business. But if independent
experience and a non-domestic nature happen to reside in the same woman,
then the neurosis appears in full bloom. Against the adulation given to
women singers and actresses, against the fancied rewards of literature
and business, the domestic lot seems drab to this non-domestic type.

Here the question arises: Is there room in our society for matrimony and
a business career? That a large number of exceptional women have found
it possible to be mothers, housewives, authors, and singers at one and
the same time does not take away from the fact that in the majority of
cases such a combination means either a childless marriage or the
turning over of an occasional child to servants: it means the
abandonment of the home and the living in hotels, except in the few
cases where there is wealth and trusty servants. Wherever women who have
children are poor and work in factories, there is the greatest infant
mortality, there is the greatest amount of juvenile delinquency, and
there is the greatest amount of marital difficulty. Our present
conception of matrimony demands that woman remains in the home until
such time at least as her children are able to care largely for
themselves.

In the history of the worst cases of the housewife's neurosis one finds
previously existing trouble, though, as I have before this emphasized,