The lady is in a different class, and open to a different danger. She is not worn out by overwork, but weakened by idleness. She is not starved and stunted by the hopeless lack of expression, but is, on the contrary, distorted by a senseless profusion of expression. There is pathos even to tears in the perforated cardboard fly-traps dangling from the gaudy hanging lamp in the farmhouse parlour; the little weazened, withered blossom of beauty thrust forth from the smothered life below. There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass of freakish ornament on walls, floors, chairs, and tables, on specially contrived articles of furniture, on her own body and the helpless bodies of her little ones, which marks the unhealthy riot of expression of the overfed and underworked lady of the house.
Every animal want is met, save those of air and exercise, though nowadays we let her out enough to meet those, if she will do it in games and athletic sports--anything that has not, as Veblen puts it, "the slightest taint of utility." She is a far more vigorous lady physically, than ever before. Also, nowadays, we educate her; in the sense of a large supply of abstract information. We charge her battery with every stimulating influence during youth; and then we expect her to discharge the swelling current in the same peaceful circuit which contented her great-grandmother! This gives us one of the most agonising spectacles of modern times.
Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the modern mind; that socially-developed mind begotten of centuries of broadest human intercourse; and, in our later years of diffused education, rapid transit, and dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its range and intensity with each generation. This tremendous engine, the healthy use of which requires contact with the whole field of social stimulus to keep up its supplies, and the whole field of social activity for free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in its own single house. There is of course a margin of escape--there must be.
In earlier decades the suppressed activity of this growing creature either still found vent in some refined forms of household industry, as in the exquisite embroideries of our grandmothers, or frankly boiled over in "society." The insatiate passion of woman for "society" has puzzled her unthinking mate. He had society, the real society of large human activities; but he saw no reason why she should want any. She ought to be content at home, in the unbroken circle of the family. While the real labours of the house held her therein she stayed, content or not; but, free of those, she has reached out widely in such planes as were open to her, for social contact. As women, any number of women, failed to furnish any other stimulus than that she was already overfilled with--they being each and all mere ladies of houses--she was naturally more attracted to the more humanly developed creature, man.