WHAT'S WRONG WITH WOMEN?
Schindler, Dr. John A.
What's Wrong with Women? by DR. JOHN A. SCHINDLER Five years ago The Progressive published two articles by John A. Schindler, "Greatest Cause of Illness," and "Keystones of Healthy Living," which...
...This new liberty which the Ameri| can woman has achieved as her part of the American ideal of individual liberty for all, is the best thing thai has ever happened to woman, to the family, and to the human race...
...but the children are hers, and giving them help means more to her than does her expendable self...
...This percentage is not as high as it should be, or as it can be if attention is paid to the vital factors responsible for the discontent and unhappiness...
...and in the matter of vice and crime he outdoes women about eight to one...
...Maturity is the collection of attitudes that enables one to handle fiult situations in a way that is fytnefkial to oneself and to all the i|le« involved...
...He has written fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays, radio scripts, and documentary movies...
...If you follow the history of all the women in any given area, you will find that roughly 25 per cent of them have a degree of E.I.I, that requires medical care at least once every year -through the years...
...There is good evidence that rather than being the weaker, woman has the superior physical nature...
...In the same series of patients it would appear that bachelor men comprised 36 per cent of all the men patients and in the male population at large single men comprise only 23 per cent of the total...
...The thing we must remember, and never forget, in making the statement "How nice the American woman has it today," is that the new freedom is not the kind of freedom implied in having "a high old time" on a weekend holiday...
...This advantage he has used for years in helping him assume a dominant role...
...Her acute strength may not be as great as man's but her endurance at continued physical labor is greater...
...She has a seven-day-a-week job, and she is occupied with it from the moment she arises in the morning until she goes to bed at night...
...His control has not been an unmitigated blessing...
...Women are primarily interested in personal things, in people, and in human relations—attitudes we could use more of...
...In virtually every doctor's office, whether he is a general practitioner or a specialist, the picture is essentially the same...
...She may decorate a house drably because she never developed the capacity and she never took the effort to gain the know-how for decorating it thrillingly and creatively...
...Physiologically she adjusts more quickly to physical changes in the environment and she can stand untoward conditions longer...
...Many men and women remain as naively egotistical and self-centered all their lives as a four-to-six-year-old child...
...Schindler, chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine of the Monroe, Wisconsin Clinic, has now written a new book, Woman's Guide to Better Living, which Prentice-Hall, Inc...
...He and his wife, also a writer, live and work together on a farm in the Connecticut Berkshires, where Borland recently completed his twelfth book, The Amulet, to be published next month...
...But there is another important point to women's life—a point even more important than the fact that her life is drab...
...Hal Borland says of himself: "My special interests are American history and geography and wild life, and most of my writing has dealt with the American people and their dreams and purposes...
...The first factor in man's "superiority" is that he is superior in sheer physical strength owing to a larger bone and muscle structure...
...Many a raw wilderness of a man has been fashioned into something worthwhile by a woman without whom he would have floundered all his life...
...the coming generation will get a little of it...
...A woman should not marry a man passively to be his mistress, his cook, and his housekeeper...
...Certainly he has a new freedom...
...basis for the fact that so many womeff are discouraged, complaining, and unhappy...
...a disease that is the physical effect produced by anxious, disturbed, irritated, and unhappy emotions...
...Maturity in the strict sense is rarely a matter of judgment, unless we mean judgment in forming and adopting mature attitudes...
...Men, particularly, with the egocentricity that characterizes the male, are ready to claim they are "superior...
...Woman should make her influence felt more and more and bring to our political and social problems her outlook that our primary concern must be the welfare of human beings— every human being...
...Floyd M. Martinson found that emotional difficulties were markedly less frequent among single than married women...
...Human things and human values are her specially designed field—values between herself and the people she meets, between herself and her husband...
...Nature and the Outdoors by HAL BORLAND A new feature starting next month in The Progressive Hal Borland comes to The Progressive with a lifetime background of nature writing rich in inspiration for the mind and spirit of man...
...Summing up these differences, there are some males who are superior to some females, but the reverse is true just as often...
...The more unselfish a person can be, and the more completely he learns to give others the same consideration he gives himself, the more he helps himself...
...The book became a national best seller with sales exceeding half a million copies...
...Enlightened selfishness and consideration for others pays off on all levels of human living...
...That is the general pattern...
...They are trying to manage their complicated role of liberated homemaker without adequate ability...
...She nourishes them, feeds them, cares for them during their most impressionable and formative years...
...There is no question that woman's life is miore drab, less creative, less thrilling, less meaningful, more confining, more replete with thankless drudgery and trivial irksome irritations, less rewarding, and generally harder than man's...
...In discussing their problems with thousands of women patients with E.I.I., I concluded that the great bulk of the difficulty issues from marital and family problems...
...he will most probably not have what is needed...
...trouble that brings emotional stress of a sufficient grade to produce gross unhappiness and emotionally induced illness...
...The significance of this picture is not the emotionally induced illness per se...
...Men are more interested in impersonal things, in facts as facts, and thus far they have tended to make better scientists, although women are now strongly challenging that superiority...
...These last two provisions are the1...
...The name that best fits the sort of thing we are talking about is maturity...
...Her job at once is to understand him, to help him understand himself, to help him rise to his capacities, to encourage him and to give him some of her vision...
...he obtains by his sacrifice an ultimate satisfaction...
...The very fact that the male characteristics of aggressiveness and pugnacity have become dominant in society has had much to do with fomenting the wars and the other 57 varieties of conflict that so jeopardize and disturb human living...
...maturity is effective...
...The woman creates new people and creates their values...
...When it comes to downright folly, man is far weaker than woman...
...childishness is ineffective...
...It calls for abilities in the abstract, for talents of a most exacting nature, for personal qualities of the highest order, and for adequate training (which she seldom gets) in the art and science of its accomplishment...
...She gives birth to a new human being—to two, to three,, or more...
...The second advantage he has exploited is his freedom from the childbearing function that periodically incapacitates women...
...Every community, and the world at large, is sadly in need of the human values and humanitarian outlook that women can bring to its problems...
...certainly he has never had it so good...
...Such a new arrangement calls for more ability, as well as for more work—the ability for shrewd financing, better cooking, better housekeeping, more creative imagination to maintain the high American standard of living in the matter of houses, meals, clothes, education, and recreation—than any other marriage arrangement has ever required before...
...One sees in the men, too, that their difficulties stem similarly from their immaturities...
...the silverware needs cleaning, there is washing in the basement...
...v The simplest definition of maturity is that it is the ability to act in a way that* is not immature or childish...
...Almost invariably, the attitudes that do people no good, but are instead potentially harmful, are the attitudes typically found in childhood...
...will publish soon...
...It is the demand for capacities that she does not have that gradually wears down her powers of adjustment, flexibility, and reaction...
...The average woman's working hours are much longer than the average man's...
...Psychiatrists and psychologists know very clearly what attitudes are good for people, and what attitudes are not good...
...It is she who must bring into her marriage the imagination to create a wholesome companionship between them...
...We learn that these are persons whose rightful human heritage, like our own, is freedom from tyranny, freedom from injustice, freedom from preventable catastrophes, freedom from want, from fear, from malignant influences...
...Men seem to do better in mechanical, mathematical, and abstract reasoning tests, while women usually excel in tests based on memory, language ability, artistic taste, and social awareness...
...Hers is the power of making them or breaking them, making their whole lives good or making their whole lives miserable nightmares of maladjustment...
...A woman's life is drab only if she is drab...
...His editorials on the outdoors in the New York Times over the past fifteen years have earned for Mr...
...These are entirely new lives over which she has control...
...Public opinion still keeps women out of some activities and handicaps her in others...
...Maturity" is a name for a definite set of qualities and abilities...
...It would be hard to say that any one maturity is more important than all the others, and to pick this or that one out for honor would be unfair and unrealistic...
...But until the present day we have not possessed the knowledge for starting such education...
...3. Self-reliance...
...In our society, a man may achieve fame more easily than a woman, but that is probably due to the fact that in our culture the cards are stacked in favor of the man being successful...
...Our generation, of course, will not get it...
...It is becoming too apparent that much of human society, at the local as well as the world level, has been warped by male aggressiveness and selfishness...
...Equality for women, of course, includes being allowed to do anything usually reserved for men, should any woman choose that avenue of self-expression, but much more meaningful and valuable to women is an equality that places a proper value on her special capacities, her special emotional and intellectual assets, her natural orientation toward human compassion and human building, that values her role as a homemaker as being equal or superior to any job on earth...
...If a woman has the curiosity and the desire to increase her knowledge of the world around her—especially the part of the world in which she has the makings of an expert, the human relations part— if she has imagination enough to visualize ways in which she can use her talents in influencing and shaping her part of that world, if she has the capacity and the control of herself to create and bring into being the ideas she has visualized, she is not going to lead a drab, uncreative life...
...Some of these unfortunate women have E.I.I, in a kaleidoscopic fashion every day of the year, year in and year out...
...The problem 'that married women are having boils down to an inability to meet the situations that marriage and raising a family pose for them...
...There has always been a great deal of silly bantering that one sex is superior to the other...
...It required less ability to be the old-fashioned type of wife who had all her decisions made by her husband and all of her thinking and activity cut out for her by set convention^ than to be the kind of wife who has as much to say about everything, in-eluding finances, as the husband, and more to say than the husband about the children, about the kind of home she wants, and about the kind of outside activity she wishes to engage in...
...Her job is a better, more interesting, more influential, more creative job than any of these...
...Hence these beneficial attitudes are called mature...
...Her limitations are 'the same limitations that strangle a man's life—limitations of imagination, self-development, vision, and, finally, effort...
...What is more, housework is the sort of thing that always gives her a feeling that things are never done...
...Her life can be a constant round of unrewarded drudgery because she hasn't the imagination to invent an outlet that is rewarding, or a project that is a relief from drudgery...
...The very process of cooperating with people calls for a consideration and understanding of their needs which, in turn, brings us the awareness that these are people like ourselves...
...In his mental capacities, the mate again tends towards extremes as far as intelligence is concerned, while female intelligence tends towards a mean, so that the average woman is intellectually more capable than the average man...
...This freedom of action and dignity of individualism belong to the American woman whether she chooses marriage as a career or whether she enters some businesses profession...
...and most assuredly—and don't forget this—he has never needed so much ability and capacity before, nor has he ever assumed so much...
...What man has such a creative opportunity...
...This is true also in men, although they, more than women, have some of the source of their difficulties outside the home...
...The chief trouble with women is that the job that society and biology have given them—that of managing a marriage and raising a successful rfamily—is the greatest of all possible human achievements and it is the most difficult...
...what they become is more dependent upon her capacities than upon any other single factor...
...Which are the more numerous, the contented or the discontented women...
...next month in THE PROGRESSIVE mistake to assume that social equal-by between the sexes has now been ichieved...
...It is there we find the answer to our question: "What is wrong with women...
...Men are also interested in ideas as ideas, a quality that has resulted in a tremendous amount of nonsense being spread among thehu--man race...
...will also be surprised that maturity is composed of a set of factors that are more nearly attitudes than anything else, attitudes of a certain kind toward the things that happen to us in life...
...Hers is the innate power to increase the value of human capabilities in dealing with other human beings, of enlarging and refining personal and social values that may already exist...
...By judicious, well-planned housekeeping she can find herself an hour or two every day for writing, for studying, for painting, for weaving, for jewelry making, for piano lessons, for attending lectures, for working for some worthwhile organization...
...They will be as good as what she can put into them...
...Her failing ability leads to final frustration and dogged defeat...
...Psychologically she adjusts more readily and rapidly to situational disturbances and caft withstand situational stress to a great: er degree than can a man...
...And in reviewing more 'than a thousand consecutive cases of E.I.I., I have found that the incidence of single women in the total is only six per cent, whereas the best available figures are that single women comprise 18 per cent of all women...
...JOHN A. SCHINDLER Five years ago The Progressive published two articles by John A. Schindler, "Greatest Cause of Illness," and "Keystones of Healthy Living," which were later expanded into a full length book, How to Live 365 Days A Year...
...It pays off first of all in our immediate families, and it pays off in our relations with the entire world...
...The basic and fundamental reason for being unselfish is the purely selfish one that it helps a person more than being selfish...
...Now that we finally have the knowledge, some time will be necessary to implement so great a reorientation in education...
...The bulk of medical practice in the United States—50 to 75 per cent of it—is concerned with emotionally induced illness (E.I.I...
...and the generation after that will begin to be thoroughly indoctrinated with what it takes to be a mature adult...
...there is always another meal just around the corner, and the last dishes are waiting to be washed...
...On the contrary, there is every evidence that women are biologically more able to stand physical and psychological stress than are men...
...it.discloses a great amount of care, difficulty, and trouble in a person's life gradually growing intolerable, like a screw being steadily and remorselessly turned tighter...
...The lot and status of woman have come far in the last hundred years, but there is still a long way to go...
...A person spends 20 years growing up in a family, going to school and to church, and becomes an adult without enough maturity to keep him out of trouble...
...There is a point where really effective enlightened selfishness becomes so seemingly pure as to look like unrewarded philanthropy...
...Woman is biologically, socially, and psychologically fitted to the creation of human things and human values, the type of values that the race needs more sorely than any others...
...Man's avowed superiority is based upon two factors that, in typical masculine fashion, he has maneuvered to the disadvantage of women...
...We feel confident you'll be moved and inspired by Hal Borland as he captures the essence of the beauty and meaning of the unfolding seasons...
...Maturity is a matter of the attitudes you bring to the choice of a husband, to living with a husband, to the problem of raising a family, rather than an intellectual acuity in solving crossword puzzles, getting the better of some witty nuisance sitting beside you at a banquet table, or knowing what stocks to buy...
...These situations are of a wide variety although certain patterns keep repeating themselves...
...This article and a concluding instalment to be published next month are adapted from that book with the permission of Dr...
...If they must be graded in their order of importance, I would say the key maturities can be narrowed down to four: 1. Enlightened selfishness and consideration for others...
...Emotionally induced illness is an indicator of something else far more significant...
...The statement about women in America having it so wonderful quite rightly infers that she has more freedom to be an individual—that is to say, more freedom to live a life of her own design, to wield and exert her influence as an individual, to make the decisions that direct the course of her life and her family's life, to assume responsibility for her own plans...
...It is pre...
...The woman can and should create community and civic values...
...The sad part is that maturity, or growing up psychologically, has never been taught to people in any organized, effective way, yet it is the very thing everyone needs more of...
...Instead, it is the kind of freedom from top management supervision and someone else's rules that a vice president of a concern achieves when he becomes president...
...Schindler and Prentice-Hall, Inc.© 1957 by Prentice-Hall, Inc.—The Editors YVTHY ARE there so many women ** who have developed a condition of frustration in their lives...
...A more accurate definition of maturity is this: it is the ability to deal with the usual and most of the unusual, adult situations that are constantly arising in the course of one's fving, in a way that is beneficial to Oneself and to all the others involved...
...4. Having a predictably pleasant disposition...
...But man also fails more frequently in life...
...the following generation will get more...
...Another 25 per cent have a major attack of E.I.I, once every five years...
...We'll have to go into the offices of physicians all over the United States to grasp the picture...
...every moment there are a dozen undone tasks that hang over her...
...It is uncreative only if she is uncreative, and uninteresting only if she allows herself to remain uninteresting and uninterested...
...One frequently meets executives, professional people, businessmen, office workers, laborers who are still pretty much in the "My sled is better'n your sled" stage...
...another 25 per cent every ten years, and only the remaining 25 per cent of women do not require medical attention for E.I.I, through the years...
...The attitudes that are helpful are invariably those a person has to acquire by learning to replace the ineffective attitudes of a child...
...The idea that women are "The Weaker Sex" has no support in scientific fact...
...It is hard to define, in any concise or brief way, the particular quality that today's woman needs, or to give it a precise name...
...Adequate training not being available, the element of personal incapacity being great, and the problems in marriage (including, of tourse, the husband component) being so difficult—these are the final reasons why so many women develop E.I.I, in the course of their lives...
...Always, always keep this in mind: The important thing for anyone, but especially for a woman, because her job and her career require a higher degree of it, is to grow up and become psychologically mature...
...Seeing this group of Ameri-^ women, as the physician sees lliem daily in his office, one is impressed by the fact 'that nine out of ten of them are under emotional Stress because they lack one or more of the essential elements of maturity...
...Psychological tests show that a man's intelligence may reach higher peaks than a woman's, but that it is less capable of prolonged application...
...he commits suicide three or four times more frequently than does the female...
...A man giving his life for a cause that he believes more important than his own person is acting on the highest level of enlightened selfishness...
...The bathroom is scrubbed, and before long it needs to be scrubbed again...
...One is inclined to give enlightened selfishness and consideration first place because psychiatry has amply revealed that selfishness is the immaturity that does people most harm, and unselfishness the maturity that does them most good...
...values that she creates in her children, in her family, in her community from the neighborhood level to the national level...
...First let me say that the frustration in so many women's lives has nothing to do with any weakness that women might have as women...
...She should marry with the idea of being an active partner who is going to make a presentable man out of her husband...
...Man has used these two advantages, more than any others, to control things pretty much as he pleases...
...Women control their own activities better, and have a better understanding and insight into others, a greater feeling and sympathy for human and personal relations...
...the attic closets should be cleaned...
...There is also a difference in the type of thinking each can best do...
...There is some evidence, although it is not sufficiently rich to be conclusive, that single women have E.I.I, much less frequently than do married women...
...A mother sacrifices her comfort and her health for her children...
...The root of the matter invariably is that the woman is faced with a situation to which she frequently does not have the answer and for which she finds no ready, easy solution...
...We develop the enlightened view that every other human being is a person like ourselves, endowed with the same feelings of love and hate, of joy and sorrow, of longing and desire for a better existence...
...2. Making the most of it...
...She can plan, create, and keep a home that is a delight for those who live in it...
...Maturity is thus defined in terms of having the attitudes that enable a person to live the most useful and happy kind of life in our sort of world...
...But that is only a starter for her creative efforts...
...In spite of the recent trend in Western civilization towards the emancipation of women, it would be...
...cisely these qualities and abilities that Hpppyssihg element whose lack Kpnmarily responsible for the Bptety in people's lives, for the com-gptining, the restlessness, the unhap-ipess...
...For instance, Dr...
...responsibility...
...Men are more aggressive and pugnacious, more liable to get into trouble with the law...
...This is a delusion men have enjoyed through the years, and it is only recently that scientific investigation has shown that neither sex is innately superior to the other in any significant way...
...Borland a reputation as one of the most deeply sensitive nature writers in America...
...The chances are that, if it is to be done, she is the one who will have to do it, who will have the sense and the capacity for doing it...
...he has a higher mental deficiency and mental breakdown rate...
...But a slim though always strong thread of self-interest always remains, never fear...
...And the most astonishing part of this picture is that there are three women patients with emotionally induced illness to every man with the same disease...
...On the basis of many surveys that all give about the same answer, 63 per cent of the women in this country are happy and content...
...trouble that is self-inflicted merely because of incompetence...
Vol. 21 • September 1957 • No. 9
