The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  How could a girl or woman who was not a psychoanalyst discount such ominous pronouncements, which, in the forties, suddenly began to pour out from all the oracles of sophisticated thought?

  It would be ridiculous to suggest that the way Freudian theories were used to brainwash two generations of educated American women was part of a psychoanalytic conspiracy. It was done by well-meaning popularizers and inadvertent distorters; by orthodox converts and bandwagon faddists; by those who suffered and those who cured and those who turned suffering to profit; and, above all, by a congruence of forces and needs peculiar to the American people at that particular time. In fact, the literal acceptance in the American culture of Freud’s theory of feminine fulfillment was in tragicomic contrast to the personal struggle of many American psychoanalysts to reconcile what they saw in their women patients with Freudian theory. The theory said women should be able to fulfill themselves as wives and mothers if only they could be analyzed out of their “masculine strivings,” their “penis envy.” But it wasn’t as easy as that. “I don’t know why American women are so dissatisfied,” a Westchester analyst insisted. “Penis envy seems so difficult to eradicate in American women, somehow.”

  A New York analyst, one of the last trained at Freud’s own Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna, told me:

  For twenty years now in analyzing American women, I have found myself again and again in the position of having to superimpose Freud’s theory of femininity on the psychic life of my patients in a way that I was not willing to do. I have come to the conclusion that penis envy simply does not exist. I have seen women who are completely expressive, sexually, vaginally, and yet who are not mature, integrated, fulfilled. I had a woman patient on the couch for nearly two years before I could face her real problem—that it was not enough for her to be just a housewife and mother. One day she had a dream that she was teaching a class. I could not dismiss the powerful yearning of this housewife’s dream as penis envy. It was the expression of her own need for mature self-fulfillment. I told her: “I can’t analyze this dream away. You must do something about it.”

  This same man teaches the young analysts in his postgraduate clinicum at a leading Eastern university: “If the patient doesn’t fit the book, throw away the book, and listen to the patient.”

  But many analysts threw the book at their patients and Freudian theories became accepted fact even among women who never lay down on an analyst’s couch, but only knew what they read or heard. To this day, it has not penetrated to the popular culture that the pervasive growing frustration of American women may not be a matter of feminine sexuality. Some analysts, it is true, modified the theories drastically to fit their patients, or even discarded them altogether—but these facts never permeated the public awareness. Freud was accepted so quickly and completely at the end of the forties that for over a decade no one even questioned the race of the educated American woman back to the home. When questions finally had to be asked because something was obviously going wrong, they were asked so completely within the Freudian framework that only one answer was possible: education, freedom, rights are wrong for women.

  The uncritical acceptance of Freudian doctrine in America was caused, at least in part, by the very relief it provided from uncomfortable questions about objective realities. After the depression, after the war, Freudian psychology became much more than a science of human behavior, a therapy for the suffering. It became an all-embracing American ideology, a new religion. It filled the vacuum of thought and purpose that existed for many for whom God, or flag, or bank account were no longer sufficient—and yet who were tired of feeling responsible for lynchings and concentration camps and the starving children of India and Africa. It provided a convenient escape from the atom bomb, McCarthy, all the disconcerting problems that might spoil the taste of steaks, and cars and color television and backyard swimming pools. It gave us permission to suppress the troubling questions of the larger world and pursue our own personal pleasures. And if the new psychological religion—which made a virtue of sex, removed all sin from private vice, and cast suspicion on high aspirations of the mind and spirit—had a more devastating personal effect on women than men, nobody planned it that way.

  Psychology, long preoccupied with its own scientific inferiority complex, long obsessed with neat little laboratory experiments that gave the illusion of reducing human complexity to the simple measurable behavior of rats in a maze, was transformed into a life-giving crusade that swept across the barren fields of American thought. Freud was the spiritual leader, his theories were the bible. And how exciting and real and important it all was. Its mysterious complexity was part of its charm to bored Americans. And if some of it remained impenetrably mystifying, who would admit that he could not understand it? America became the center of the psychoanalytic movement, as Freudian, Jungian and Adlerian analysts fled from Vienna and Berlin and new schools flourished on the multiplying neuroses, and dollars, of Americans.

  But the practice of psychoanalysis as a therapy was not primarily responsible for the feminine mystique. It was the creation of writers and editors in the mass media, ad-agency motivation researchers, and behind them the popularizers and translators of Freudian thought in the colleges and universities. Freudian and pseudo-Freudian theories settled everywhere, like fine volcanic ash. Sociology, anthropology, education, even the study of history and literature became permeated and transfigured by Freudian thought. The most zealous missionaries of the feminine mystique were the functionalists, who seized hasty gulps of predigested Freud to start their new departments of “Marriage and Family Life Education.” The functional courses in marriage taught American college girls how to “play the role” of woman—the old role became a new science. Related movements outside the colleges—parent education, child-study groups, prenatal maternity study groups and mental-health education—spread the new psychological superego throughout the land, replacing bridge and canasta as an entertainment for educated young wives. And this Freudian superego worked for growing numbers of young and impressionable American women as Freud said the superego works—to perpetuate the past.

  Mankind never lives completely in the present; the ideologies of the supergo perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present and to new developments, and, so long as they work through the superego, play an important part in man’s life, quite independently of economic conditions.33

  The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry—almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era—were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll’s house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science—anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now—kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

  The Functional Freeze, the Feminine Protest, and Margaret Mead

  Instead of destroying the old prejudices that restricted women’s lives, social science in America merely gave them new authority. By a curious circular process, the insights of psychology and anthropology and sociology, which should have been powerful weapons to free women, somehow canceled each other out, trapping women in dead center.

  During the last twenty years, under the catalytic impact of Freudian thought, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and other workers in the behavioral sciences have met in professional seminars and foundation-financed conferences in many university centers. Cross-fertilization seemed to make them all bloom, but some strange hybrids were produced. As psychoanalysts began to reinterpret Freudian concepts like “oral” and “anal” personality in the light of an awareness, borrowed from anthropology, that cultural processes must have been at
work in Freud’s Vienna, anthropologists set out for the South Sea islands to chart tribal personality according to literal “oral” and “anal” tables. Armed with “psychological hints for ethnological field workers,” the anthropologists often found what they were looking for. Instead of translating, sifting, the cultural bias out of Freudian theories, Margaret Mead, and the others who pioneered in the fields of culture and personality, compounded the error by fitting their own anthropological observations into Freudian rubric. But none of this might have had the same freezing effect on women if it had not been for a simultaneous aberration of American social scientists called functionalism.

  Centering primarily on cultural anthropology and sociology and reaching its extremes in the applied field of family-life education, functionalism began as an attempt to make social science more “scientific” by borrowing from biology the idea of studying institutions as if they were muscles or bones, in terms of their “structure” and “function” in the social body. By studying an institution only in terms of its function within its own society, the social scientists intended to avert unscientific value judgments. In practice, functionalism was less a scientific movement than a scientific word-game. “The function is” was often translated “the function should be” the social scientists did not recognize their own prejudices in functional disguise any more than the analysts recognized theirs in Freudian disguise. By giving an absolute meaning and a sanctimonious value to the generic term “woman’s role,” functionalism put American women into a kind of deep freeze—like Sleeping Beauties, waiting for a Prince Charming to waken them, while all around the magic circle the world moved on.

  The social scientists, male and female, who, in the name of functionalism, drew this torturously tight circle around American women, also seemed to share a certain attitude which I will call “the feminine protest.” If there is such a thing as a masculine protest—the psychoanalytic concept taken over by the functionalists to describe women who envied men and wanted to be men and therefore denied that they were women and became more manly than any man—its counterpart can be seen today in a feminine protest, made by men and women alike, who deny what women really are and make more of “being a woman” than it could ever be. The feminine protest, at its most straightforward, is simply a means of protecting women from the dangers inherent in assuming true equality with men. But why should any social scientist, with godlike manipulative superiority, take it upon himself—or herself—to protect women from the pains of growing up?

  Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women; it has often cloaked a very real prejudice, even when it is offered in the name of science. If an old-fashioned grandfather frowned at Nora, who is studying calculus because she wants to be a physicist, and muttered, “Woman’s place is in the home,” Nora would laugh impatiently, “Grandpa, this is 1963.” But she does not laugh at the urbane pipe-smoking professor of sociology, or the book by Margaret Mead, or the definitive two-volume reference on female sexuality, when they tell her the same thing. The complex, mysterious language of functionalism, Freudian psychology, and cultural anthropology hides from her the fact that they say this with not much more basis than grandpa.

  So our Nora would smile at Queen Victoria’s letter, written in 1870: “The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety…. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position.”

  But she does not smile when she reads in Marriage for Moderns:

  The sexes are complementary. It is the works of my watch that move the hands and enable me to tell time. Are the works, therefore, more important than the case?…Neither is superior, neither inferior. Each must be judged in terms of its own functions. Together they form a functioning unit. So it is with men and women—together they form a functioning unit. Either alone is in a sense incomplete. They are complementary…. When men and women engage in the same occupations or perform common functions, the complementary relationship may break down.1

  This book was published in 1942. Girls have studied it as a college text for the past twenty years. Under the guise of sociology, or “Marriage and Family Life,” or “Life Adjustment,” they are offered advice of this sort:

  The fact remains, however, that we live in a world of reality, a world of the present and the immediate future, on which there rests the heavy hand of the past, a world in which tradition still holds sway and the mores exert a stronger influence than does the theorist…a world in which most men and women do marry and in which most married women are homemakers. To talk about what might be done if tradition and the mores were radically changed or what may come about by the year 2000 may be interesting mental gymnastics, but it does not help the young people of today to adjust to the inevitables of life or raise their marriages to a higher plane of satisfaction.2

  Of course, this “adjustment to the inevitables of life” denies the speed with which the conditions of life are now changing—and the fact that many girls who so adjust at twenty will still be alive in the year 2000. This functionalist specifically warns against any and all approaches to the “differences between men and women” except “adjustment” to those differences as they now stand. And if, like our Nora, a woman is contemplating a career, he shakes a warning finger.

  For the first time in history, American young women in great numbers are being faced with these questions: Shall I voluntarily prepare myself for a lifelong, celibate career? Or shall I prepare for a temporary vocation, which I shall give up when I marry and assume the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood? Or should I attempt to combine homemaking and a career?…The great majority of married women are homemakers….

  If a woman can find adequate self-expression through a career rather than through marriage, well and good. Many young women, however, overlook the fact that there are numerous careers that do not furnish any medium or offer any opportunity for self-expression. Besides they do not realize that only the minority of women, as the minority of men, have anything particularly worthwhile to express.3

  And so Nora is left with the cheerful impression that if she chooses a career, she is also choosing celibacy. If she has any illusions about combining marriage and career, the functionalist admonishes her:

  How many individuals…can successfully pursue two careers simultaneously? Not many. The exceptional person can do it, but the ordinary person cannot. The problem of combining marriage and homemaking with another career is especially difficult, since it is likely that the two pursuits will demand qualities of different types. The former, to be successful, requires self-negation; the latter, self-enhancement. The former demands cooperation; the latter competition…. There is greater opportunity for happiness if husband and wife supplement each other than there is when there is duplication of function…4

  And just in case Nora has any doubts about giving up her career ambitions, she is offered this comforting rationalization:

  A woman who is an effective homemaker must know something about teaching, interior decoration, cooking, dietetics, consumption, psychology, physiology, social relations, community resources, clothing, household equipment, housing, hygiene and a host of other things…. She is a general practitioner rather than a specialist….

  The young woman who decides upon homemaking as her career need have no feeling of inferiority…. One may say, as some do, “Men can have careers because women make homes.” One may say that women are released from the necessity for wage earning and are free to devote their time to the extremely important matter of homemaking because men specialize in breadwinning. Or one may say that together the breadwinner and the homemaker form a complementary combination second to none.5

  This marriage textbook is not
the most subtle of its school. It is almost too easy to see that its functional argument is based on no real chain of scientific fact. (It is hardly scientific to say “this is what is, therefore this is what should be.”) But this is the essence of functionalism as it came to pervade all of American sociology in this period, whether or not the sociologist called himself a “functionalist.” In colleges which would never stoop to the “role-playing lessons” of the so-called functional family course, young women were assigned Talcott Parsons’ authoritative “analysis of sex-roles in the social structure of the United States,” which contemplates no alternative for a woman other than the role of “housewife,” patterned with varying emphasis on “domesticity,” “glamour,” and “good companionship.”

  It is perhaps not too much to say that only in very exceptional cases can an adult man be genuinely self-respecting and enjoy a respected status in the eyes of others if he does not “earn a living” in an approved occupational role…. In the case of the feminine role the situation is radically different…. The woman’s fundamental status is that of her husband’s wife, the mother of his children…6