the housewife is the
overemotional woman.

We have already considered the effect of certain types of emotion on
health and endurance and may formulate it as follows: Emotion may act
as a great bodily disturbance, affecting every organ and every function
of the body. What we call nervousness is largely made up of abnormal
emotional response, of persistent emotion, of the blocking of energy by
emotion.

Now people differ from the very start of life in their response to
situations. One baby, if he does not get what he wants, turns his
attention to something else, and another will cry for hours or until he
gets it. One will manifest anger and strike at being blocked or impeded
in his desires, and the other will implore and plead in a baby way for
his wish.

In the face of difficulties one man shows fear and worry, another acts
hastily and without premeditation, a third flares up in what we call a
fighting spirit and seeks to batter down the resistance, and still a
fourth becomes very active mentally, calling upon all of his past
experience and seeking a definite plan to gain his end.

A loss, a deprivation, plunges one type of person into deepest sorrow, a
helpless sorrow, inert and symbolic of the hopeless frustration of
love. The same affliction striking at another man's heart makes him
deeply and soberly reflective, and out of it there ensues a great
philanthropy, a great memorial to his grief. For the one, sorrow has
deenergized; for the other it has energized, has raised the efforts to a
nobler plane.

Now there are women, and also men, to whom emotion acts like an overdose
of a drug. Parenthetically, emotion and certain drugs have very similar
effects. No matter how joyous the occasion and how exuberant their joy,
a mood may settle into their lives like a fog and obscure everything.
This mood may arise from the smallest disappointment; or a sudden vision
of possible disaster to one they love may appear before them through
some stray mental association. They are at the mercy of every sad memory
and of every look into the future.

Preeminently, they are the victims of that form of chronic fear called
worry, more aptly named by Fletcher "fearthought." He implied by this
name that it was a sort of degenerated "forethought."

If the baby has a cough, then it may have tuberculosis or pneumonia or
some disastrous illness, of which death is the commonest ending. How
often is the doctor called in by these women and ne