The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  Women who were not encouraged to win emotional separation go from mother to the arms of other little girls and then to men, merely changing partners, each of whom stands in for mother. When we are attracted to a certain man who makes us feel excruciatingly alive, we look for ourselves in his eyes but do not trust what we see. She would not approve. Not that we think of the disapproval as hers, for it is ours now. She is us and we are she. We marry, have children, but we need her approval still, if only by phone, even more than we need our husband’s. One disapproving word from her and we are shattered. She can be dead, but when we act in a way of which she wouldn’t approve, or wear an exhibitionistic dress, our disapproval and rejection of the “New Us” is hers.

  Perhaps a clearing can be made in the Semantic Jungle by taking the overly loaded word “separation” and putting it in a less threatening context than that of mother/child. Instead of the nursery, think of a heated sexual relationship between a man and a woman. Initially, when they meet, there is an excitement between two people who have their own lives and identities. The distance between them is what allows the spark to ignite. Then they have sex. Like a litmus test, the woman who never went through a healthy separation with her mommy will now lose herself by falling into this man like a pool and drowning her frail identity in his. Sex with him felt like a giving over of her self, arousing in her all her yearning for what she once had or wished she had, the symbiotic union with Mommy.

  Women don’t consciously decide this, but it happens. The man will feel it less, his mother having felt pressured by the rigorous demands of society to let him practice again and again his ability to stand alone. Not all men will accomplish healthy separation, but they must put a good face on it. The man’s problem will be letting down his iron defenses enough to sink into the momentary oneness of love and great sex in full knowledge that he will rise again, renewed, into his known self. “Where is my exciting, sexual woman?” he wonders. “Why doesn’t he reconnect?” grieves the woman who was an independent siren minutes ago but now feels little, lost, and frightened by fears of abandonment without her mommy/man.

  It grows ever more awkward these days: The deeper into the workplace we move, the thornier the issues of separation become. The money, the seeming independence, says one thing, but when we have sex, the siren song of symbiosis is awakened. How to work properly with one ear cocked for his telephone call, his promise of love eternal? It is infuriating to a woman of independent means! Damn men for not being good at mothering grown-up babies! Men are only out for themselves. Only women know what another woman needs. And so women lie down with one another.

  Meanwhile, the beauty industry thrives, women having more money to spend on looks than ever before. Needing no one’s permission, we buy one new “look” after another and wonder, when we stand before our crowded closet in the morning, why we don’t recognize anything as particularly “us.” Closets are filled and emptied every season, so unsatisfying is fashion’s futile effort to dress women who don’t know whose judgment to trust when we look in the mirror. Our anger grows ever more monumental, keeping us locked in the past, having us spin our wheels deeper and deeper into the sand. How humiliating to be in the adult workplace and still stuck in nursery anger. We deny it, proving independence with sexual display, higher heels, lower necklines, until we see the anxious little face through our cigarette smoke in the mirror over the bar. Whose awful face is that?

  Separation, beauty, competition—would any of these thorny subjects have been questioned, dissected, and argued about had our entry into the workplace not necessitated understanding ourselves? So long as we lived in a strictly patriarchal society, wherein women were confined to the home and were defined by our maternal role, there was no burning need for theories on separation and individuation. It was expected that a daughter would automatically repeat her mother’s life. A mother who watched her daughter like a hawk, monitored her every move, even read her diary, was a good mother. A daughter who had freedom, too much individuality, who looked and acted different from all the other girls was thought to be unlucky.

  In society’s eyes, mothers who gave up their lives for their children were the best mothers. Sacrifice defined a good mother, even if that sacrifice included a woman having only her children in her life, nothing and no one else that made her feel alive. If she clung to the child, teaching the child to cling to her, what did it matter? The child wasn’t going anywhere except to another pair of arms, another protector, a husband. “A son will leave you and get himself a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter for all of her [or is it “your”?] life” wasn’t just an amusing sampler over the bureau. It was reality.

  The Women’s Movement may have marked women’s exit from the home into the workplace and demanded a reassessment of how women are raised, but the necessity for a sharp image of ourselves as individuals had always existed. Such photos are rare in old family albums—a faded snapshot of a singular presence, a woman standing alone with neither husband nor children to define her. In fact, we had been at risk for generations without an image in our heads of who we were alone; husbands, after all, were known to wander, and children do grow up and leave.

  The anxiety and anger at having no self outside a relationship were swallowed, the depression went undiagnosed, the envy of men’s economic power unnamed, for how could one bite the hand that fed us? Even to try to voice anger at men’s power would ultimately lead to another source of anger, which no nice woman acknowledged, to mother, whom we loved and who loved us. In the old days, prior to modern feminism, women gagged, choked, got migraines, fell into depressions, and died rather than admit to the ambivalence of mother love.

  Anger at mother denied, women tried to find with a man the only replica of love known, a symbiotic oneness in which we gave ourselves totally to him—regardless of whether he’d asked. Women’s expectations of men were enormous; after all, hadn’t we given up everything for him? Hadn’t mother promised that if we rejected all the possibilities of a life—especially sex—that we would get a prince as our reward? It was now surrendered to him, our sexuality, handed over for him to reconstitute and bring back to life. Virginity is one thing, and when consciously selected, a fine choice. But the woman who expected a man to bring her to sexual life by “giving” her an orgasm usually had a long and unhappy wait.

  Eventually, women gave up on sex, on even trying. The sexual urge disappeared because it never had fit the internal self-image the woman had as a Nice Girl. In that short gap of time between mother and husband, whatever sexual spark had been ignited by boys was charged with the forbidden thrill of breaking mother’s rules. Those nights in boys’ arms, parked in dark cars with romantic music feeding the illicit loss of control, had been a thrilling but scary sampling of independence. Marriage, a husband, now this felt like going home. Without conscious decision, the daughter began to dress like her mother, talk and walk and decorate her house like mother’s. Soon there was a child, another daughter to replay the generational image.

  I choose to write about sex because it is the missing piece in most women’s lives, the booster that could fire us out of dependency if only we would take sexual responsibility. The Nice Girls wear a “look” that identifies them as belonging to a women’s world that defines itself as hating sex. You can choose not to have sex, but to hate it is to hate any woman who drinks from its spring, for the women’s world is only bearable when all the girls refrain from sex.

  Before I became a writer I told myself that I was “different” from my mother in that I was sexual and she was not. It was in this self-congratulatory mood that I sat down to write about women’s sexuality. Didn’t my mirror reflect a very sexual presentation—the see-through clothes, the no-bra nipples, the swagger of the seventies? Most women, my research showed, traced their sexual shame as far back as they could recall; very well, the nursery was the place to begin. The original title of My Mother/My Self was The First Lie, which should have warned me of the difficulties ahead.


  Three years later, when I stood up after writing the words “The End,” I was a veteran of a war. My prize for my work was that I’d stripped the idealized trappings from my relationship with my mother. I saw her as a woman, good and bad, a woman in whom I also saw my self. We weren’t all that different; she was brave, sexual, competitive, and, yes, a bit of an exhibitionist too. It was a gift.

  Certain Matriarchal Feminists now attack Mahler for encouraging mothers to separate from their children. These are the women who have become mothers themselves during these past ten, fifteen years. Maybe they once marched for freedom, fought for feminist rights, but they are still loath to practice independence with their babies. “Mother blamers!” they yell at those of us who say and write that women’s true freedom begins in the sureness of who we are, separate unto ourselves.

  As usual, the antiseparation people aim their heaviest artillery at men, a false target. “Patriarchy thrives by keeping women divided,” they write, “setting them up to compete with each other…. Scientific experts tell mothers that each child should separate to achieve autonomy. This is a lie. This distorted view of good mothering places a mother’s feelings at odds with cultural perceptions of what is necessary for her child’s growth and well-being. Moreover, this lie of separation leads mothers into an unintentional betrayal of daughters.”

  This is absurd. To accuse men of creating the idea of separation allows misguided women to sidestep the problems with their own mothers and find with their daughters the oneness no man could ever give them. Patriarchy? Mahler was the mother of the theory of separation and one of her closest students was another woman, psychiatrist Louise Kaplan, who has written brilliantly of her teacher’s philosophy.

  Many feminists who marched twenty years ago gave up men because to love them drained a woman of her newfound sense of identity. Love with a man rearoused the old overwhelming desire to mesh, an alien feeling to those fighting for women’s rights. But what was worse, humiliating when you think of it, was that men were/are reluctant to mesh, to lie down and mold their bodies to women, fearing that the lady of the lake would pull them down. How easy, and useful, to turn rejecting, unyielding men into the beasts, the ogres, the source of all of women’s problems. Men were already the enemy that didn’t want to yield to women an equal wage in the workplace; very well, dump this thorny issue of separation on men too. Make men the brutes, the origin of all of women’s worries, including the pursuit of beauty.

  Mahler’s teachings have only been popularized in the past twenty years. Moving into the workplace in the mid-seventies meant that women were turning the world upside down, changing the most venerated tenets of society. We needed road maps, diagrams, explanations of who we were, how we had become this way if we were to create this new identity of woman the provider. To become the New Woman, we had to understand traditional woman, ourselves. Mahler was key.

  It should be remembered that motherhood wasn’t a popular role for much of the sixties and seventies. We were competing with men, and other women, for jobs and assignments and we had to be assertive, tough, feelings that were at odds with motherhood. Mahler fit this time perfectly; the idea of emotional separation was palatable because it promised selfhood, independence, the identity we needed in our Dress for Success suits.

  So long as this first generation of feminists in the workplace were on their own and single, Mahler was a champion. It was when these same women decided to become mothers that the theory of separation no longer worked for them. Holding their babies in their arms, they didn’t want to hear about separation; they felt reunited with their own mothers. “Ah, so this is why she didn’t want to let me go!” (Let me emphasize that Mahler never teaches us to abandon our own mothers; emotional separation doesn’t require divorcing mother, or even confronting her.) This oneness, this symbiotic bliss they felt with their own babies, this was what mothering, womanliness, was all about, not competition or sexuality.

  “As soon as I saw my daughter… and felt how much I wanted for her,” one of these anti-Mahler women writes, “I knew that whatever my mother had done in her relationship with me, she did it out of love.” Impossible. Nobody loves perfectly. To expect it of a mother, or to attempt to give it, is doomed. Love is imperfect. Most mothers do their best, but none is perfect, nor should they ask it of themselves. Immortalizing our mothers as perfect is a false monument, an impossible model to emulate. In this idealized image are buried mother’s inevitable imperfections, little burials that we will resurrect and internalize as a way of forgiving her for her “imperfections”: See, Mommy, I’m just like you, nagging, overly critical, possessive.

  Women who blame everything that is wrong in women’s world on men would set up a frightening new world in which we have projected all that is bad in women on to men; we are good, they are evil. Even as women compete with men and with one another in the workplace—which is inevitable—these women deny that they, the holy ones, are at all competitive. Only Bad Men compete. And only women can love. And on and on it goes, a battle plan that attempts to wrest from men as much economic and political power as possible while at the same time keeping daughters intimately tied to women, content to live in blissful oneness because to acknowledge anger at and competition with Mommy/women is as terrifying as death.

  Women today don’t need or require men, even in a family situation, as we once did. So, again, women write books against the idea of separating from their daughters, in which they blame men for inflicting the idea on women. “The relationship most essential to disrupt in order for Patriarchy to work is the relationship between mother and daughter,” writes Shere Hite. “Mothers and daughters are not ‘natural enemies’ (competing for the father as Freud egotistically imagined), but ‘natural’ friends, as they have many things in common. If this relationship were unbroken, however, patriarchy could not continue, since all power would not be in the hands of men.”

  It is the ultimate power of control of a women’s world, a matriarchy, that these women want; and they use the hated word separation as a battering ram against evil outsiders who would force women to face anger at one another and thus break up the world of women in which there are no fathers and no men. Statements like “Whatever my mother [did] with me, she did it out of love” now give the new mother who wrote these words permission to repeat with her daughter the same relationship she had with her own mother, in which everything she does, good and bad, can be said to be out of love.

  Thus she betrays her daughter. By not letting her go, allowing her a private space in which to create her own boundaries, she will never know her self, never know the “someone” who can love and not just need another. Because healthy separation is so difficult to argue away, some women try to have it both ways; they write books about “separated attachments” and “connected autonomy,” thus making the Semantic Jungle more impenetrable than ever.

  In a world as disruptive as ours is today, where there is no constancy and nothing lasts or holds together, it feels more painful than ever to let go of someone. We fear for them and for ourselves too, alone. All the more reason for Mahler’s theory of oneness and separation to be in place; a child can only be protected for a short period of time. Before the first year is over, safety must begin to be felt from the inside, a learned process of individuation best taught by the people who love the child most dearly. Without this gift, the child, the adult, is in jeopardy. Beware the Hallmark greeting cards that once again promote the idealization of motherhood.

  Lest you think I am writing as the omniscient observer, let me say that in my first marriage I exemplified a woman raised without Mahler’s internalized sureness of identity, who tried to find with men the symbiotic bliss I had never had with my mother. Had this thorny word separation been thrown at me, I would have laughed contemptuously. Did I not enter marriage as the most self-supporting, independent single girl in town? Had I ever let a man pay a penny for my rent? More than anything, my sexuality promoted me as Miss Autonomy.

  He m
ay not have been the first man to whom I surrendered myself, but my former husband was the first with whom I played house, making him the home base I’d never had as a child. Because he was the mother I’d never had, who adored only me, I remained in that marriage far longer than I should have. Having created Eden, I could not easily leave.

  No sooner was I married than my look changed. It wasn’t simply the more conservative dress and carefully coifed hair, both of which became more matronly without my consciously thinking it through. I carried myself less assertively too, shoulders not quite so thrown back, the chin down, rather like a nice lady cow. Let me add that my husband was not averse to the scenario; men may strut and posture, but many are surreptitiously looking for another mother too.

  And in my way I was the good mother a man like him could live with. I bought his clothes, packed his suitcases, and, as my success as a writer grew, deflected praise, deferring to him as the “real” writer in the family. “Why don’t you get into your success on a bigger scale?” an old friend once asked. But if I had let myself get bigger than my husband, who would have taken care of me?

  So I handed him whatever money I made, at first refusing even to have my name on the checks. It was important that he take note of my smallness and dependence. That I eventually became the breadwinner in the family never altered my emotional picture of myself as the child and him as the mother, though I would never have consciously allowed myself such a description. “He never takes his eyes off you!” women friends would say enviously. I was getting what I always wanted, a mommy.

  And he didn’t ever look at another woman while we were together: Now I can see that more than anything, it was the prime characteristic that persuaded me to marry him. Oh, he was attractive, amusing, and an intellectual, but other men had these qualities; no, what he alone offered was something I’d first noticed when we were still dating other people. I had observed how closely he kept to his woman, never really “looking” at me or any other woman. Until I presented myself to him.