THE UNEMPLOYED WIFE.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3452, 17 February 1912, Page 4

THE UNEMPLOYED WIFE.

A CHARACTER STUDY

(By PHILIP GIBBS, in. the “London Daily Chronicle.”

The morbid woman is becoming a nuisance. Novelists are weaving their plots around her, and dragging her poor nerve-strung heart through 500 liarrowing pages. The very latest heroine suiters'habitually from hysteria, which causes her to abandon her honest but commonplace husband after some years of humdrum married life. So on tbe stage one finds the same type of woman holding on.to the back of an upholstered chair, denouncing the tyranny which fasteneg her to a rather stout but wellmeaning gentleman, who, as she explains with a thrill of passionate despair, does not understand her. Undoubtedly tins unhappy lady does not exist) merely in the imagination ol novelists and playrights. They have drawn her from life. They have found her in the drawing-rooms in which they take afternoon tea, and by their very hearthsides. Indeed, she has thrust into their hands documents in which she has analysed her own morbid psychology with pitiful and elaborate care. In such books as “The Dangerous Age” she has exposed herself without shame with all her quivering heart laid bare. Day by day tbe newspapers report new aspects of her neurotic character as it is unveiled in miserable divorce cases which end in broken homes and in tragedy from which she at least has no escape. It is a serious thing to realise that this woman who is the central character in so much -of our drama and fiction is an actual and not uncommon type in everyday life.

A PRODUCT IN MODERN SOCIETY. What is the cause of so much unhappiness among the women of to-day? We must find out the cause and the remedy if we want to put our house in order. It is easy for those of strong and steady nerves to dismiss these ladies in two words by calling them hysterical creatures. That hysteria seems to be creeping more and more into English homes, .and unhappiness, misery, despair and not less to be pitied, or more to be tolerated, because, they are the outcome of hysteria. W e must get to the root of it all. To my mind the root, and the fruit, grow up in the heart of the unemployed wife. She is to some extent tire product of modern society. Certainly, her numbers have increased enormously with the growth of that class of people who live in the villas and suburban houses ranging in rent from £SO to £l5O a year. It is not among the rich and so-called leisured classes that one fincis the unemployed wife for those people may live if they like, in a round of social pleasures and gaieties and duties which do at least occupy the time and minds or married women. But the true and most miserable type of unemployed wife is to be found among women who live m pretty houses in. the suburbs maintained by business and professional men who go by a certain train up to town every morning and return by a certain train every evening. For the first few years of her marriage she is liappy enougk- The first adventures in household economy aie amusing. The building-up of a little social circle requires tact and time. The domestic servant problem seems of unending interest and difficulty. She lias to explore the mysteries that lurk in her husband’s character, and she is con-stantly-surprised by new and unexpected revelations of prejudices and connotions and weaknesses that were utterly hidden from her in tlieir courting days. There comes the secret tug-of-war between them for the supremacy of will power. Generally it ends in a compromise, not altogether satisfactory on either side, but affording a working rule of lie. Then, perhaps, a child comes or two, or three. That gives her work to do and things to think about, and saves her just in time from a strange and deadly feeling of loneliness and boredom which was beginning to creep over her when her husband was away from her in town. DEVELOPING NERVES. So a few more years pass until the babies are old enough to go to school or until her husband is able to afford a governess for them. He is able to give her more little luxuries now—two servants instead of one, more evening gowns, more latitude with the housek oping tills. She has no need to make or mend the children’s clothes. She Ims no need to do anything in tbe world for them, except play with them when they are nice and clean, for she has her nurse and her governess, who do not like her interference with tlieir duties. A very lucky woman, in the opinion of her neighbours. But suddenly, quite unexpectedly perhaps, she begins to realise one day

that she is very miserable. She findsthat tears are dropping for no apparent reason on to the pages of a Mudie’s nov€ l_the fourth she has borrowed that week. It is strange that novels no longer prevent her from thinking, and that, however sensational their plot, her mind wanders from them to the problem of her own life. How futileeverything is beginning to seem! How utterly purposeless is the scheme of her daily routine! Her Wednesday afternoons “at home,” which amused her so nnich at first-, are now almost insuffer- • a ble. • These suburban women, with I thoir prattle about their maid-servants I and their babies, whose lives are so ex- ! actly like her own—must she go on. 1 enduring their shallowness and foolishness? If she were a pious woman she would ; take to religion, but she has not the devotional temperament. If she were I an immoral woman she might take to drink or the devil • but she is quite | respectable. She is not even frivolous, I nor full of vanity, so that fashion and I frocks do not give her a consuming ! interest. She is only a wretched ! woman with nothing in the world worth doing, nothing that matters in the very least. She begins to develop “nerves.” Her husband’s little idiosyncrasies, the way he yawns after supper, the way he sneezes three times in succession if lie feels a draught, the. way he reads his * paper at the breakfast table, annoy her so that she could almost scream at the torture or it all. His very good nature, bis utter ignorance that anything is wrong with the woman who sits on the opposite side of his table pouring out his coffee, the impossibility of explaining it to him, tempt her to hate him. Sometimes she has difficulty in keeping the hatred out of her eyes. THE EMPTY LIFE.

So one might go on with the analysis of the wife who gradually awakens to the pitiful fact that she has no employment for her hands or heart or brain. It is. alas! a character study of a very large number of women in suburban homes. For in. our modern scheme of things the housewife in the moderately well-to-do home is not encouraged to work. The Early Victorian woman so despised by her granddaughters, had her dainty needlework and tapestry, her bedmaking and jam-making, and a thousand and one little household duties which have now been abandoned because of the social fetish or the domestic servant who is supposed to be

necessary in even the smallest home. The wife of the man on £250 a year who is “’something in the City,” has often nothing to do but sit alone in her little drawing-room, with the latest library novel, brooding over the hollowness of her own life. It is for this reason that so many women have taken up the cause of women’s suffrage with the fervour of religious fanaticism. It has filled the great gap in their heart. It has given them something to think about and something to do beyond the trivialities and inanities of society in the suburbs. It lias given them ail object in life. But many women shirk the political arena and disapprove of the aims and methods of the suffragists. Tlieir traditions of girlhood, tlieir sentiment, tlieir clinging to the ideals expressed in the ordinary romantic novel, all restrain them from allying themselves with ladies who do darning and unconventional things. So, in spite of the feminine movement there are still immense numbers of women of the middle class who remain without employment and thoroughly miserable. Is there no remedy for this class- of woman whose condition is largely caused by the snobbishness and pretentiousness of her middle class husband and her middle class self? Is it not time that she should be brought out

o f her little drawing-room and interested in some sort, of that social and philanthropic work in which helpers are always wanted? Or if she shuns public work should she not go back to her children’s nursery and her kitchen, to bed-making and bread-making, to needlework, and the little . domestic duties which are now handed over to the servants who make a big hole in their husband’s income? Some; change must be made in the social philosophy of the suburbs if the misery of the unemployed wife and the evils resulting from her condition are to be removed.