days this is held out to her as a way to praise, flattery, and power. It
becomes a cardinal purpose, a goal, even an ideal.

Unlike the purposes of men this goal is attained early, if at all, and
then Nature or Life strip it away. The well-to-do woman or the
exceptional poor woman may succeed in keeping her figure and her facial
beauty for a relatively long time, though by the forties even these have
usually given up the struggle. For the poor woman the fading comes
early,--household work, bearing children, sedentary life, worry, and a
non-appreciative husband bringing about the fatal change.

I doubt if men see their youth slipping away with the anguish of women.
To men, maturity means success, greater proficiency, more
achievement,--means purpose-expanding. To women, to whom the main
purpose of life is marriage, it means loss of their physical hold on
their mate, loss of the longed for and delightful admiration of others;
it means substantially the frustration of purpose.

And I have noticed that the very worst cases of neurosis of the
housewife come in the early thirties, in women previously beautiful or
extraordinarily attractive. They watch the crows'-feet, the fine
wrinkles, the fat covering the lines of the neck and body with something
of the anguish that the general watches the enemy cutting off his lines
of communication or a statesman marks the rise of an implacable rival.

Popular literature, popular art, and popular drama, including in this by
a vigorous stretching of the idea the movie, are in a conspiracy against
reality. This is of course because of the tyranny of the "Happy Ending."
While the happy ending is psychologically and financially necessary, in
so far as the publishers, editors, and producers are concerned, what
really happens is that the disagreeable phases of life, not being
faced, persist. To have a blind side for the disagreeable does not rule
it out of existence; in fact, it thus gains in effect.

To say that housekeeping is looked upon essentially as menial, to say
that it is monotonous, that it is sedentary, and has the ill effects
that arise from these characteristics, is not to deny that it has
agreeable phases. It has an agreeable side in its privacy, its
individuality, and it fosters certain virtues necessary to civilization.
That I do not lay stress on these is because novelist, dramatist, and
scenario author, as well as churchman and statesman, have always dwelt
on these. The