The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  It was, perhaps, not her fault that she was taken so literally that procreation became a cult, a career, to the exclusion of every other kind of creative endeavor, until women kept on having babies because they knew no other way to create. She was often quoted out of context by the lesser functionalists and the women’s magazines. Those who found in her work confirmation of their own unadmitted prejudices and fears ignored not only the complexity of her total work, but the example of her complex life. With all the difficulties she must have encountered, pioneering as a woman in the realm of abstract thought that was the domain of man (a one-sentence review of Sex and Temperament indicates the resentment she often met: “Margaret, have you found a culture yet where the men had the babies?”), she has never retreated from the hard road to self-realization so few women have traveled since. She told women often enough to stay on that road. If they only heard her other words of warning, and conformed to her glorification of femininity, perhaps it was because they were not as sure of themselves and their human abilities as she was.

  Margaret Mead and the lesser functionalists knew the pains, the risks, of breaking through age-old social strictures.27 This awareness was their justification for qualifying their statements of women’s potentiality with the advice that women not compete with men, but seek respect for their uniqueness as women. It was hardly revolutionary advice; it did not upset the traditional image of woman any more than Freudian thought upset it. Perhaps it was their intention to subvert the old image; but instead they gave the new mystique its scientific authority.

  Ironically, Margaret Mead, in the 1960’s, began to voice alarm at the “return of the cavewoman”—the retreat of American women to narrow domesticity, while the world trembled on the brink of technological holocaust. In an excerpt from a book titled American Women: The Changing Image, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (March 3, 1962), she asked:

  Why have we returned, despite our advances in technology, to the Stone Age picture?…Woman has gone back, each to her separate cave, waiting anxiously for her mate and children to return, guarding her mate jealously against other women, almost totally unaware of any life outside her door…. In this retreat intofecundity, it is not the individual woman who is to blame. It is the climate of opinion that has developed in this country…

  Apparently Margaret Mead does not acknowledge, or perhaps recognize her own role as a major architect of that “climate of opinion.” Apparently she has overlooked much of her own work, which helped persuade several generations of able modern American women “in desperate cavewoman style, to devote their whole lives to narrow domesticity—first in schoolgirl dreaming and a search for roles which make them appealingly ignorant, then as mothers and then as grandmothers…restricting their activities to the preservation of their own private, and often boring existences.”

  Even though it would seem that Margaret Mead is now trying to get women out of the home, she still ascribes a sexual specialness to everything a woman does. Trying to seduce them into the modern world of science as “the teacher-mothers of infant scientists,” she is still translating the new possibilities open to women and the new problems facing them as members of the human race into sexual terms. But now “those roles which have historically belonged to women” are stretched to include political responsibility for nuclear disarmament—“to cherish not just their own but the children of the enemy.” Since, beginning with the same premise and examining the same body of anthropological evidence, she now arrives at a slightly different sexual role for women, one might seriously question the basis upon which she decides the roles a woman should play—and finds it so easy to change the rules of the game from one decade to the next.

  Other social scientists have arrived at the astonishing conclusion that “being a woman was no more and no less than being human.”28 But a cultural lag is built into the feminine mystique. By the time a few social scientists were discovering the flaws in “woman’s role,” American educators had seized upon it as a magic sesame. Instead of educating women for the greater maturity required to participate in modern society—with all the problems, conflicts, and hard work involved, for educators as well as women—they began educating them to “play the role of woman.”

  The Sex-Directed Educators

  It must have been going on for ten or fifteen years before the educators even suspected it—the old-fashioned educators, that is. The new sex-directed educators were surprised that anyone should be surprised, shocked that anyone should be shocked.

  The shock, the mystery, to the naive who had great hopes for the higher education of women was that more American women than ever before were going to college—but fewer of them were going on from college to become physicists, philosophers, poets, doctors, lawyers, stateswomen, social pioneers, even college professors. Fewer women in recent college graduating classes have gone on to distinguish themselves in a career or profession than those in the classes graduated before World War II, the Great Divide. Fewer and fewer college women were preparing for any career or profession requiring more than the most casual commitment. Two out of three girls who entered college were dropping out before they even finished. In the 1950’s, those who stayed, even the most able, showed no signs of wanting to be anything more than suburban housewives and mothers. In fact, to professors at Vassar and Smith and Barnard, resorting to desperate means to arouse students’ interest in anything college could teach them, the girls seemed suddenly incapable of any ambition, any vision, any passion, except the pursuit of a wedding ring. In this pursuit they seemed almost desperate, as early as freshman year.

  Out of loyalty to that more and more futile illusion—the importance of higher education for women—the purist professors kept quiet at first. But the disuse of, the resistance to, higher education by American women finally began to show in the statistics:1 in the departure of the male presidents, scholars, and educators from women’s colleges; in the disillusionment, the mystified frustration or cool cynicism of the ones who stayed; and in the skepticism, finally, in colleges and universities, about the value of a professorial investment in any girl or woman, no matter how apparently able and ambitious. Some women’s colleges went out of business; some professors, at coeducational universities, said one out of three college places should no longer be wasted on women; the president of Sarah Lawrence, a women’s college with high intellectual values, spoke of opening the place to men; the president of Vassar predicted the end of all the great American women’s colleges which pioneered higher education for women.

  When I read the first cautious hints of what was happening, in the preliminary report of the psychological-sociological-anthropological Mellon Foundation study of Vassar girls in 1956, I thought, “My, how Vassar must have deteriorated.”

  Strong commitment to an activity or career other than that of housewife is rare. Many students, perhaps a third, are interested in graduate schooling and in careers, for example, teaching. Few, however, plan to continue with a career if it should conflict with family needs…. As compared to previous periods, however, e.g., the “feminist era,” few students are interested in the pursuit of demanding careers, such as law or medicine, regardless of personal or social pressures. Similarly, one finds few instances of people like Edna St. Vincent Millay, individuals completely committed to their art by the time of adolescence and resistant to any attempts to tamper with it…2

  A later report elaborated:

  Vassar students…are further convinced that the wrongs of society will gradually right themselves with little or no direct intervention on the part of women college students…. Vassar girls, by and large, do not expect to achieve fame, make an enduring contribution to society, pioneer any frontiers, or otherwise create ripples in the placid order of things…. Not only is spinsterhood viewed as a personal tragedy but offspring are considered essential to the full life and the Vassar student believes that she would willingly adopt children, if it were necessary, to create a family. In short, her future identity is
largely encompassed by the projected role of wife-mother…. In describing the qualities to be found in an ideal husband, the majority of Vassar girls are quite explicit in their preference for the man who will assume the most important role, that is, handle his own career and make the majority of decisions affecting matters outside the home…. That the female should attempt, in their thinking, to usurp the prerogatives of the male is a distasteful notion which would seriously disrupt their own projected role of helpmate and faithful complement to the man of the house.3

  I saw the change, a very real one, when I went back to my own college in 1959, to live for a week with the students in a campus house at Smith, and then went on to interview girls from colleges and universities all over the United States.

  A beloved psychology professor, on the eve of his retirement, complained:

  They’re bright enough. They have to be, to get here at all now. But they just won’t let themselves get interested. They seem to feel it will get in their way when they marry the young executive and raise all those children in the suburbs. I couldn’t schedule the final seminar for my senior honor students. Too many kitchen showers interfered. None of them considered the seminar sufficiently important to postpone their kitchen showers.

  He’s exaggerating, I thought.

  I picked up a copy of the college newspaper I had once edited. The current student editor described a government class in which fifteen of the twenty girls were knitting “with the stony-faced concentration of Madame Defarge. The instructor, more in challenge than in seriousness, announced that Western civilization is coming to an end. The students turned to their notebooks and wrote ‘Western civ—coming to an end,’ all without dropping a stitch.”

  Why do they need such baiting, I wondered, remembering how we used to stand around after class, arguing about what the professor had said—Economic Theory, Political Philosophy, the History of Western Civilization, Sociology 21, Science and the Imagination, even Chaucer. “What courses are people excited about now?” I asked a blonde senior in cap and gown. Nuclear physics, maybe? Modern art? The civilizations of Africa? Looking at me as if I were some prehistoric dinosaur, she said:

  Girls don’t get excited about things like that anymore. We don’t want careers. Our parents expect us to go to college. Everybody goes. You’re a social outcast at home if you don’t. But a girl who got serious about anything she studied—like wanting to go on and do research—would be peculiar, unfeminine. I guess everybody wants to graduate with a diamond ring on her finger. That’s the important thing.

  I discovered an unwritten rule barring “shop talk” about courses, intellectual talk, in some college houses. On the campus, the girls looked as if they were in such a hurry, rushing, rushing. Nobody, except a few faculty members, sat around talking in the coffee dives or the corner drugstore. We used to sit for hours arguing what-is-truth, art-for-art’s-sake, religion, sex, war and peace, Freud and Marx, and all the things that were wrong with the world. A cool junior told me:

  We never waste time like that. We don’t have bull sessions about abstract things. Mostly, we talk about our dates. Anyhow, I spend three days a week off campus. There’s a boy I’m interested in. I want to be with him.

  A dark-eyed senior in a raincoat admitted, as a kind of secret addiction, that she liked to wander around the stacks in the library and “pick up books that interest me.”

  You learn freshman year to turn up your nose at the library. Lately though—well, it hits you, that you won’t be at college next year. Suddenly you wish you’d read more, talked more, taken hard courses you skipped. So you’d know what you’re interested in. But I guess those things don’t matter when you’re married. You’re interested in your home and teaching your children how to swim and skate, and at night you talk to your husband. I think we’ll be happier than college women used to be.

  These girls behaved as if college were an interval to be gotten through impatiently, efficiently, bored but businesslike, so “real” life could begin. And real life was when you married and lived in a suburban house with your husband and children. Was it quite natural, this boredom, this businesslike haste? Was it real, this preoccupation with marriage? The girls who glibly disclaimed any serious interest in their education with talk of “when I’m married” often were not seriously interested in any particular man, I discovered. The ones who were rushing to get their college work done, to spend three days a week off campus, sometimes had no real date they wanted to keep.

  In my time, popular girls who spent many weekends at Yale were often just as serious about their work as the “brains.” Even if you were temporarily, or quite seriously, in love, during the week at college you lived the life of the mind—and found it absorbing, demanding, sometimes exciting, always real. Could these girls who now must work so much harder, have so much more ability to get into such a college against the growing competition, really be so bored with the life of the mind?

  Gradually, I sensed the tension, the almost sullen protest, the deliberate effort—or effort deliberately avoided—behind their cool façades. Their boredom was not quite what it seemed. It was a defense, a refusal to become involved. As a woman who unconsciously thinks sex a sin is not there, is somewhere else, as she goes through the motions of sex, so these girls are somewhere else. They go through the motions, but they defend themselves against the impersonal passions of mind and spirit that college might instill in them—the dangerous nonsexual passions of the intellect.

  A pretty sophomore explained to me:

  The idea is to be casual, very sophisticated. Don’t be too enthusiastic about your work or anything. People who take things too seriously are more or less pitied or laughed at. Like wanting to sing, being so intent about it you make other people uncomfortable. An oddball.

  Another girl elaborated:

  They might feel sorry for you. I think you can be serious about your work and not be looked down upon as a total intellectual, if you stop now and then and think isn’t this too hysterical. Because you do it with tongue in cheek, it’s O.K.

  A girl with a fraternity pin on her pink sweater said:

  Maybe we should take it more seriously. But nobody wants to graduate and get into something where they can’t use it. If your husband is going to be an organization man, you can’t be too educated. The wife is awfully important for the husband’s career. You can’t be too interested in art, or something like that.

  A girl who had dropped out of honors in history told me:

  I loved it. I got so excited about my work I would sometimes go into the library at eight in the morning and not come out till ten at night. I even thought I might want to go on to graduate school or law school and really use my mind. Suddenly, I was afraid of what would happen. I wanted to lead a rich full life. I want to marry, have children, have a nice house. Suddenly I felt, what am I beating my brains out for. So this year I’m trying to lead a well-rounded life. I take courses, but I don’t read eight books and still feel like reading the ninth. I stop and go to the movies. The other way was harder, and more exciting. I don’t know why I stopped. Maybe I just lost courage.

  The phenomenon does not seem confined to any particular college; one finds it among the girls in any college, or department of a college, which still exposes students to the life of the mind. A junior from a Southern university said:

  Ever since I was a little girl, science has had a fascination for me. I was going to major in bacteriology and go into cancer research. Now I’ve switched to home economics. I realized I don’t want to go into something that deep. If I went on, I’d have been one of those dedicated people. I got so caught up in the first two years, I never got out of the laboratory. I loved it, but I was missing so many things. If the girls were off swimming in the afternoon, I’d be working on my smears and slides. There aren’t any girls in bacteriology here, sixty boys and me in the lab. I couldn’t get on with the girls anymore who don’t understand science. I’m not so intensely interested in home economi
cs as I was in bacteriology, but I realize it was better for me to change, and get out with people. I realized I shouldn’t be that serious. I’ll go home and work in a department store until I get married.

  The mystery to me is not that these girls defend themselves against an involvement with the life of the mind, but that educators should be mystified by their defense, or blame it on the “student culture,” as certain educators do. The one lesson a girl could hardly avoid learning, if she went to college between 1945 and 1960, was not to get interested, seriously interested, in anything besides getting married and having children, if she wanted to be normal, happy, adjusted, feminine, have a successful husband, successful children, and a normal, feminine, adjusted, successful sex life. She might have learned some of this lesson at home, and some of it from the other girls in college, but she also learned it, incontrovertibly, from those entrusted with developing her critical, creative intelligence: her college professors.

  A subtle and almost unnoticed change had taken place in the academic culture for American women in the last fifteen years: the new sex-direction of their educators. Under the influence of the feminine mystique, some college presidents and professors charged with the education of women had become more concerned with their students’ future capacity for sexual orgasm than with their future use of trained intelligence. In fact, some leading educators of women began to concern themselves, conscientiously, with protecting students from the temptation to use their critical, creative intelligence—by the ingenious method of educating it not to be critical or creative. Thus higher education added its weight to the process by which American women during this period were shaped increasingly to their biological function, decreasingly to the fulfillment of their individual abilities. Girls who went to college could hardly escape those bits and pieces of Freud and Margaret Mead, or avoid a course in “Marriage and Family Life” with its functional indoctrination on “how to play the role of woman.”