Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

For a time the new marriage could keep up these pretenses, especially as the elements of sex and novelty in the relationship helped conceal the contrast between theory and fact and that the marriage was basically an external and superficial relationship. But this fact remained, and in time unconscious frustrations and dissatisfactions began to operate. Often these did not reach the conscious level, especially a few generations ago, but today the question is posed by every women’s magazine, “Is your marriage a success?” But unconsciously, long before this, realization had been growing that the marriage relationship was not based on love, which must be a recognition and appreciation of personal qualities, not of status accessories. Without personal feeling based on such personal qualities, the relationship was really not a personal relationship and was really not based on love, even when the partners, with the usual lack of introspection associated with middle-class minds, still insisted that it was based on love. The consequences of such unconscious recognition of the real lack of love in the bourgeois marital relationship, in a society that never stopped reiterating in song, cinema, magazine, and book the absolute necessity of love for human happiness and “fulfillment,” will be examined in a moment.

Three generations ago the bourgeois wife rarely became aware of her frustrations. She was largely confined to her home, was kept too busy with children and housework to find much time for meditation on her situation or for comparison with other wives or the outside world generally. Brought up in a male-dominated family, she was prepared to accept a similar situation in her own life. This means that her outside contacts and her general picture of the world came to her through the screen of her husband’s vision of these things.

The decrease in the number of children in middle-class families and the spread of labor-saving devices, from vacuum cleaners to frozen foods, gave the bourgeois wife increasing leisure in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Enterprising editors like Edwin Bok filled that leisure with new slick women’s magazines (like the Ladies’ Home Journal ). Popular novels and, to a lesser extent, the early movies, dramatic matinees, and spreading women’s clubs allowed women to build up a vision of a fantasy world of romantic love and carefree, middle-class housewives with dazzling homes and well-behaved and well-scrubbed children. By 1925 the average bourgeois housewife was becoming increasingly frustrated because her own life was not that pictured in the women’s magazines. Her increasing leisure gave her time to think about it, and her more frequent contact with other wives encouraged her to raise her voice in criticism of her husband whose financial inability to provide her with the life she came to regard as her due seemed to her to justify her desire to nag him onward to greater effort in pursuit of money. To him this became nagging; to her it was only an occasional reminder of the expectations under which she had entered upon the marriage relationship.

While this was going on, the outside world was also changing. Women became “emancipated” as a consequence of World War I, with considerable urging onward from the women’s magazines. Shorter skirts and shorter hair became symbols of this process, but even more significant was the appearance in the outside world of a great increase in the number of jobs that could be done best, or only, by women. As part of this process, there took place considerable changes in bourgeois morality, the ending of chaPerónage, greater freedom between the sexes, and the acceptance of divorce as morally possible in bourgeois life (a custom that came in from the stage and cinema).

As part of this whole process, there occurred a dramatic event of great social significance. This was the reversal in longevity expectations of men and women in adult life. A century ago (to be sure, in a largely rural context), a twenty-year-old man could expect to live longer than a twenty-year-old wife. In fact, such a man might well bury two or three wives, usually from the mortality associated with childbirth or other female problems. Today, a twenty-year-old man has little expectation of living as long as a twenty-year-old woman. To make matters worse, a twenty-year-old woman a century ago married a man considerably older than herself, at least in the middle classes, simply because future preference required that a man be established economically before he began to raise a family.

Today, from a series of causes, such as the extension of the female expectation of life faster than the male expectation, the increased practice of birth control, coeducation (which brings the sexes into contact at the same age), weakening of future preference and of the middle-class outlook generally, which leads to marriages by couples of about the same age, husbands now generally die before their wives. Recognition of this, the increased independence of women, adaptation to taxes and other legal nuisances, has given rise to joint financial accounts, to property being put in the wife’s name, and to greatly increased insurance benefits for wives. Gradually the wealth of the country became female-owned, even if still largely male-controlled.

But this had subtle results; it made women more independent and more outspoken. Bourgeois men gradually came to live under a regime of persistent nagging to become “better providers.” To many men, work became a refuge and a relief from domestic revelations of the inadequacy of their performance as economic achievers. This growth of overwork, of constant tension, of frustration of emotional life and of leisure began to make more and more men increasingly willing to accept death as the only method of achieving rest. Bourgeois men literally began to kill themselves, by unconscious psychic suicide, from overwork, neurotic overindulgence in alcohol, smoking, work, and violent leisure, and the middle class slowly increased its proportion of materially endowed widows.

One notable change in this whole process was a shift, over the past century, from the male-dominated family to a female-dominated family. The locality in which the young couple set up their home had an increasing tendency to be matrilocal rather than patrilocal. In increasing numbers of cases, where the young couple married before the groom’s educational process was finished, they even lived with her family (but very rarely with his family). Increasingly part of the burden of housework was shifted to the husband: washing dishes, buying groceries, even tending the children. In 1840 a child could cry at night and would invariably be tended by its mother, while the father slept peacefully on, totally unaware of what was going on. By 1960, if a child cried at night, the chances were as likely as not that the mother would hear nothing while the father took over the necessary activities. If this were questioned by anyone, the mother’s retort was pointed: “I take care of baby all day; I don’t see why he can’t take care of it at night!”

Closely related to this confusion, or even reversal, of the social roles of the sexes was decreasing sexual differentiation in child-rearing practices. As recently as the 1920’s girl babies were reared differently from boys. They were dressed differently, treated differently, permitted to do different things, and admonished about different dangers. By 1960, children, regardless of sex, were all being brought up the same. Indeed, with short cropped hair and playsuits on both, it became impossible to be sure which was which. This led to a decrease in the personality differences of men and women, with males becoming more submissive and females more aggressive.

This tendency was accelerated by new techniques of education, especially in the first twelve years of life. The neurological maturation of girls was faster than that of boys, especially in regard to coordination, such as in feeding oneself, talking, dressing oneself, toilet-training, learning to read, and general adjustment to school. The shift from home to school in the early grades was adjusted to by girls more easily than by boys, partly because girls were more self-assured and gregarious. By the age of ten or twelve, girls were developed physically, neurologically, emotionally, and socially about two years in advance of boys. All this tended to make boys less self-assured, indecisive, weak, and dependent. The steady increase in the percentage of women teachers in the lower grades worked in the same direction, since women teachers favored girls and praised those attitudes and techniques that were more natural to girls. New methods, such as the whole-word method of teaching reading or the use of true-and-false or multiple-choice examinations, were also better adapted to female than to masculine talents. Less and less emphasis was placed on critical judgment, while more and more was placed on intuitive or subjective decisions. In this environment girls did better, and boys felt inferior or decided that school was a place for girls and not for boys. The growing aggressiveness of girls pushed these hesitant boys aside and intensified the problem. As consequences of this, boys had twice as many “nonreaders” as girls, several times as many stutterers, and many times as many teen-age bedwetters.