She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting "theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to capture and rob.
She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time, is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her mate.
The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness to stand by him in crooked deals.
=Health Versus Sickness.= To the old fashioned wife, weakness and sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time, a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity, she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean."
The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect her.
From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and expectation of pain."
=The Passing of the Doll.= The modern woman, active, self reliant, honest and healthy, will force out of existence a type which has lent much picturesque charm to social gatherings and to pictorial art, the doll type of woman, prettiness incarnate, of rose leaf charm, unfit for any biological function except the mild lovemaking, not so much of a husband, as of a lover. Tuberculous poets and composers of the Musset and Chopin type, affected pictorial artists like Helleu, will deplore her disappearance. Man, put at his ease by the modern woman, who does not require constant protection, mental and physical, will find the doll "too much trouble."