The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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illegal prostitution in the United States and England, in
addition to the enormous amount of clandestine relationships, are
a sufficient commentary on the results. The increasing divorce
rate, the feminist movement, the legalizing of the “illegitimate”
child in Norway and Sweden and the almost certain arrival of
similar laws in all countries indicate a softer attitude toward
sex restrictions. The rapidly increasing age of marriage means
simply that continence will be more and more difficult, for I am
not one of those who believe that the repression of this vital
instinct is without harm. Continence is socially necessary, but
beyond a certain age it is physically and mentally harmful. Man
is thus placed on the horns of a dilemma from which it will take
the greatest wisdom and the finest humanity to extricate him. But
I cannot lay claim to any part of the knowledge and ability
necessary to formulate the plan. Let us at least be candid; let
us not say grandiloquently that the sexual urge can be
indefinitely repressed without harm to the average individual. We
may safely assert that there are people, men and women both, to
whom the sex impulses are vague and of little force, but to the
great majority, at least of men, sex desire is almost a hunger,
and unsatisfied it brings about a restlessness and
dissatisfaction that enters into all the mental life. On what
basis society will meet this situation I do not pretend to know,
but this is certain,—that all over the civilized world there is
apparent an organizing rebellion against the social impediment to
sexual satisfaction.
For it must be remembered that sexual satisfaction is not alone
naked desire. It is that—but sublimated into finer things as
well. It is the desire for stability of affection, for a
sympathetic beloved, an outlet for emotion, a longing for
respectable unitary status. The unit of respectable human life is
the married couple; the girl wants that social recognition, and
so does her man. Both yearn to cast off from their old homes and
start a new one, as an initial step in successful living. The
thought of children—a little form in a little bed, and the man
and woman gazing in an ecstasy of pride and affection upon
it—makes all other pleasures seem unworthy and gives to the ache
for intimacy a high moral sanction.
This brings us to the point where we must consider those
characteristics that make up domesticity and homekeeping. Early
impressions and the consistent teaching of literature, stage,
press and religion have given to the home a semi-sacred
character, which is one of the great components of the desire to
marry, especially for women. The home is, in the minds of most of
those who enter into marriage, a place owned, peculiarly
possessed, and it offers freedom from the restraints of society
and the inhibitions of ceremony and custom. Both the man and
woman like to think that here is the place where their love can
find free expression, where she will care for him and he will
provide for her, and where their children can grow in beauty,
intelligence and moral worth under their guidance. But this is
only the sentimental side of their thought, the part they give
freest expression to because it is most respectable and “nice.”
In the background of their minds is the desire for ownership, the
wish to say, “This is mine and here I rule.” Into that comes the
ideal that the stability of society is involved and the
homekeeper is its most important citizen, but when we study the
real evolution of the home, study the laws pertaining to the
family, we find that the husband and father had a little kingdom
with wife and children as subjects, and that only gradually has
there come from that monarchical idea the more democratic
conception cherished to-day.
Men and women may be considered as domestic or non-domestic. The
domestic type of man is ordinarily “steady” in purpose and
absorbed more in work than in the seeking of pleasure, is either
strongly inhibited sexually or else rather easily satisfied;
cherishes the ideal of respectability highly; is conventional and
habituated, usually has a strong property feeling and is apt to
have a decided paternal feeling. He may of course be seclusive
and apt to feel the constraints of contact with others as
wearying and unsatisfactory; he is not easily bored or made
restless. All this is a broad sketch; even the most domestic find
in the home a certain amount of tyranny and monotony; they yearn
now and then for adventure and new romance and think of the
freedom of their bachelor days with regret over their passing.
They may decide that married home life is best, but the choice is
not without difficulty and is accompanied by an irrepressible,
though hidden dissatisfaction. On the whole, however, the
domestic man finds the home a haven of relief and a source of
pleasurable feeling.
The non-domestic man may be of a dozen types. Perhaps he is
incurably romantic and hates the thought of settling down and
putting away for good the search for the perfect woman. Perhaps
he is uninhibted sexually or overexcitable in this respect, and
is therefore restless and unfaithful. He may be bored by
monotony, a restless seeker of new experiences and new work,
possessed by the devils of wanderlust. He may be an egoist
incapable of the continuous self-sacrifice and self-abnegation
demanded by the home,—quarrelsome and selfish. Sometimes he is
wedded to an ideal of achievement or work and believes that he
travels best who travels alone. Often in these days of late
marriage he has waited until he could “afford” to marry and then
finds that his habits chain him to single life. Or he may be an
unconventional non-believer in the home and marriage, though
these are really rare. The drinker, the roue, the wanderer, the
selfish, the nonconventional, the soarer, the restless, the
inefficient and the misogynist all make poor husbands and fathers
and find the home a burden too crippling to be borne.
One of the outstanding figures of the past is the domestic woman,
yearning for a home, assiduously and constantly devoted to it,
her husband and her numerous children. Fancy likes to linger on
this old-fashioned housewife, arising in the early morning and
from that time until her bedtime content to bake, cook, wash,
dust, clean, sew, nurse and teach; imagining no other career
possible or proper for her sex; leading a life of self-sacrifice, toil and devotion. Poet, novelist, artist, and
clergyman have immortalized her, and men for the most part
cherish this type as their mother and dream of it as the ideal
wife.
Perhaps (and probably) this woman rebelled in her heart against
her drudgery and dreamed of better things; perhaps she regretted
the quickly past youth and dreaded the frequent child-bearing.
Whether she did or not, the appearance of a strongly non-domestic
type is part of the history of the latter nineteenth century and
the early twentieth.
The non-domestic women are, like their male prototypes, of many
kinds, and it would be idle to enumerate them. There is the kind
of woman that “has a career,” using this term neither
sarcastically nor flatteringly. The successful artist of whatever
sort—painter, musician, actress—has usually been quite spoiled
for domesticity by the reward of money and adulation given her.
Nowhere is the lack of proportion of our society so well
demonstrated as in the hysterical praise given to this kind of
woman, and naturally she cannot consent to the subordination and
seclusion of the home. Then there is the young business woman,
efficient, independent, proud of her place in the bustle and stir
of trade. She is quite willing to marry and often makes an
admirable mother and wife, but sometimes she finds the menial
character of housework, its monotony and dependence too much for
her. The feminist aglow with equality and imbued with too vivid a
feeling of sex antagonism may marry and bear children, but she
rarely becomes a fireside companion of the type the average man
idealizes. Then the vain, the frivolous, the sexually
uncontrolled,—these too make poor choice for him who has set his
heart on a wife who will cook his meals, darn his stockings and
care for the children. To be non-domestic is a privilege or a
right we cannot deny to women, nor is there condemnation in the
term,—it is merely a summary characterization.
Though to remain single is to be freer than to be married and
domestic, yet the race will always have far more domestic
characters. These alone will bear children, and from them the
racial characters will flow rather than from the exceptional and
deviate types, unless the home disappears in the form of some
other method of raising children. After all, the home is a
costly, inefficient method of family life unless it has
advantages for childhood. This it decidedly has, though we have
bad homes aplenty and foolish ones galore. Yet there is for the
child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender
feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred
principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of
consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only
real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there
found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we
see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when
we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free
from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home.
But we must be realistic, as well as idealistic. A silent or
noisy struggle goes on in the home between the old and the new,
between a rising and a receding generation. An orthodox old
generation looks askance on an heretical new generation; parents
who believe that to play cards or go to theater is the way of
Satan find their children leaving home to do these very things.
Everywhere mothers wonder why daughters like short skirts, powder
and perhaps rouge, when they were brought up on the corset,
crinoline and the bustle; and they rebel against the indictment
passed out broadcast by their children. “You are old-fashioned;
this is the year 1921.” When children grow up, their wills clash
with their parents’, even in the sweetest, and most loving of
homes. Behind many a girl’s anxiety to marry is the desire for
the unobstructed exercise of her will. Parents too often seek in
their children a continuation of their own peculiarities, their
own characters and ideals, forgetting that the continuity of the
generations is true only in a biological sense, but in no other
way. And children grown to strength, power and intelligence think
that each person must seek his experiences himself and forget
that true wisdom lies in what is accepted by all the generations.
Just as we have the types of husbands and the types of wives, so
we judge men and women by the wisdom, dignity and faithfulness of
their parenthood; so we judge them by the kind of children they
are to their parents. In this last we have a point in character
of great importance and one upon which the followers of Freud
have laid much—over-much—stress.
The effect of too affectionate a home training, too assertive
parenthood, is to dwarf the individuality of the child and make
him a sort of parasite, out of contact with his contemporaries,
seclusive and odd. There is a certain brand of goody-goody boy,
brought up tied to his mother’s apron strings, who has lost the
essential capacities of mixing with varied types of boys and
girls, who is sensitive, shy and retiring, or who is naively
boorish and unschooled in tact. According to some psychiatrists
this kind of training breeds the mental
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