This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Women Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Divorce is only one situation in which a wrong social attitude of women manifests itself. In previous times, when the attitude toward woman strictly relegated her to the family circle, allowing her no function and no status outside of her family, she could and should have only one interest: husband and children. In her case, divorce ended her career. Today such an attitude, although frequently observed, is not only unjustified, but actually detrimental. Women brought up and kept in such dependency on husband and family in a society which no longer is strictly patriarchal, are endangered in their future mental and emotional health and their human functioning. They are not only unprepared for the possibility of divorce which today becomes more frequent; their fear of such a possible failure makes them tense and apprehensive and often enough diminishes their ability to prevent the anticipated catastrophe in marriage. Their inability to recognize their function outside of the family leads to another more frequent and more disastrous consequence.
The number of women who break down around the period of climacteric is increasing alarmingly. Many physicians are inclined to attribute the mental and emotional breakdown at that time to the changes in the endocrine system, as if the “change of life” meant only a biological change in the functions of the glands. Careful studies and observations of patients suffering from involutional melancholia, which may vary in degree from slight depressions to fully developed psychoses, reveal that the disturbing factor is not so much the upset biological equilibrium within the body as the change in the life situations to which these patients are exposed. These disturbances are mostly found in women who have been excellent wives and mothers and who suddenly find themselves without any function in life. Their breakdown generally occurs when the children have grown up and left home. Their role as grandmothers does not satisfy them since modern parents do not permit grandparents to meddle in their affairs and keep their children away from this pampering influence. The husband, who found his own place in his business and in his social activities, cannot again pay the same attention and affection to his wife as he did when they were first married. The wife has devoted most of her time and interest to the care of the children; now she has a great deal of time on her hands and does not know what to do with it. She still has work to do in her home, of course. But this job is no longer significant and meaningful. To take care of herself and of her husband, with all the facilities of housekeeping available, does not require all her qualities and energies. So she thinks about a job. But, even if she has spent some hours on volunteer work, she has no training, no skill for any important position. She can only accept a minor position without power and responsibility, which contrasts sharply with her domestic role as queen, which she has occupied for many years.
In this predicament, without hope for any future, these women break down; and, ironically, they are often the best and most capable ones. The domestic role, still required of many women, even of those with college education, wastes their capacities for functioning within society at large. A re-education of parents, of husbands and wives is necessary to prepare our generation of girls and women for the necessary functioning outside their families. Many of the best qualities of women are ignored or wasted when they are not prepared to tackle a significant job outside of home. While society loses their valuable contributions, they themselves are unprepared for any event whereby they lose their position in life, be it divorce, maturity of children, or death of the husband. This last is of special significance, because women survive their husbands in increasing number. First, the average life expectancy of men is shorter than that of women, and, second, women generally marry men a few years their seniors. As medicine increasingly recognizes the special physical and emotional needs of old people, establishing a new medical specialty called “geriatrics,” it will become more and more evident that women need to have a function as long as they live, which necessarily involves an ultimate functioning outside of the home.
The professional reorientation of women may well create more conflicts with husbands and with society as a whole. But the readjustment of all concerned is necessary to meet the problems of our present marriages as well as those of our changing society.
