European husband and the Negro husband significantly suggests how
remarkable has been the arrest of development in the husband's customary
status during a vast period of the world's history.

[14] Hon. C. Dundas, _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, Vol.
45, 1915, p. 302.

It is in the considerable group of couples where the husband's work
separates him but little from the home that the pressure on the wife is
most severe, and without the relief and variety secured by his frequent
absence. She has perhaps led a life of her own before marriage, she knows
how to be economically independent; now they occupy a small dwelling, they
have, maybe, one or two small children, they can only afford one helper in
the work or none at all, and in this busy little hive the husband and wife
are constantly tumbling over each other. It is small wonder if the wife
feels a deep discontent beneath her willing ministrations and misses the
devotion of the lover in the perpetual claims of the husband.

But the difficulty is not settled if she persuades him to take a room
outside. He is devoted to his wife and his home, with good reason, for the
wife makes the home and he is incapable of making a home. His new
domestic arrangements sink into careless and sordid disorder, and he is
conscious of profound discomfort. His wife soon realises that it is a
choice between his return to the home and complete separation. Most wives
never get even as far as this attempt at solution of the difficulty and
hide their secret discontent.

This is the situation which to-day is becoming intensified and extended on
a vast scale. The habit and the taste for freedom, adventure, and economic
independence is becoming generated among millions of women who once meekly