Europe on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Is it legitimate to talk about some historical eras as being more anxious or nervous than others?

Marx
King Ludwig II of Bavaria
Sigmund Freud
Changes in Art
Changing Big Cities
London: 6.5 million in 1900
Berlin: 2 million in 1900

New Definitions of Gender:
VICTORIAN WOMANHOOD

Letter to London Times (January 7, 1862)
...girls go out in the city and are deliberately flirtatious and Paterfamilias had better come to terms with this.

“Rape of the Glances,”
“more than one curious and furtive glance was sent after the bold adventurer.”
“Unacquainted with the moral geography of the West-End, they innocently trip down the tabooed side of Regent-street. The natural consequence follows...”

Anti-Semitism
The Dreyfus Affair
Oscar Wilde
"To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."

"How many men there are in modern life who would like to see their past burning to white ashes before them!"
-- An Ideal Husband

"A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain."

"I prefer women with a past. They're always so damned amusing to talk to."

"No man is rich enough to buy back his past."

"Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones."

"Men become old, but they never become good."
--Lady Windermere's Fan

"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything."
--A Woman of No Importance

"Women are meant to be loved, not to be understood."
--The Sphinx Without a Secret

"Women give to men the very gold of their lives. But they invariably want it back in such very small change."
--The Picture of Dorian Gray

OTHER OW QUOTES:

All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy; no man does, that is his.

Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.

The proper basis for a marriage is mutual misunderstanding.

Education is a wonderful thing, provided you always remember that nothing worth knowing can ever be taught.

To regain my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or become respectable.

Social Darwinism