It really normal? Maybe I have get use to it, do you experience
this before too?
No. I have not experienced it before. But the stories are all
the same.
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 chaperonage, 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...
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!"
...This
tendency was accelerated by new techniques of education, especially
in the first twelve years of life.
The neurological maturation of girls was faster shall 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...
...The earliest feeling of sensual reassurance and
comfort any child experiences is against the body of its
mother.
To a boy baby
this is a heterosexual relationship, while to the
girl it is a relationship with the same
sex.
In most cases the little girl avoids any undesirable
persistence of this homosexual tendency by shifting her admiration
and attention to some available male, usually her
father.
Thus by the age of six or eight, a daughter has become "Daddy's
girl," awaiting his return from work to communicate the news of the
day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping that he will
read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite television
program before she must go to bed.
By the age of twelve, in a normal girl, this interest in male
creatures has begun to shift to some boy in her class at school.
With a boy baby the transference is later and less
gradual...
...the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is
insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work,
hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory
it becomes for his wife.
Part of the wife's unused emotional energy begins
to be expended in her love for her son. At
the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother's
relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded
as an emotional rival for the husband's affection.
This resentment of the daughter is most likely to occur when
there is some other cause of disturbance in the mother's
psychology, especially if this cause is associated with her
relationship to her own father. For example, as female domination
becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive feature of
American family life, the daughter's shift of attention to her
father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to
pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively
ambivalent in her feelings toward both her father and mother,
sometimes hating the latter for dominating her father and despising
his weakness in allowing it.
In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is
accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the
daughter's relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are
repeated in her relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband.
This serves to intensify both her emotional smothering and
overprotection of her son and her tendency toward emotional
rejection of her daughter as a potential danger to the relatively
precarious emotional relationship between husband and wife.
As a consequence of this
situation, the
frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him
dependent and immature as long as possible and to
seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her
out of the family circle as soon as possible...
http://real-world-news.org/bk-quigley/20.html#75
http://www.carrollquigley.net/books.htm
