The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  Thus, it did not surprise them that seventy per cent of freshmen women at a Midwestern university answered the question, “What do you hope to get out of college?” with, among other things, “the man for me.” They also interpreted answers indicating a wish to “leave home,” “travel,” and answers relating to potential occupations which were given by half the girls as symbolizing “curiosity about the sexual mysteries.”

  College and travel are alternatives to a more open interest in sexuality. Girls who complete their schooling with high school are closer to assuming an adult sex role in early marriages, and they have more developed conceptions of their sexual impulses and sex roles. Girls who will enter college, on the other hand, will delay direct realization and settlement of sexual identity, at least for a while. During the interim, sexual energy is converted and gratified through a phantasy system that focuses on college, the glamour of college life, and a sublimation to general sensuous experience.16

  Why do the educators view girls, and only girls, in such completely sexual terms? Adolescent boys also have sexual urges whose fulfillment may be delayed by college. But for boys, the educators are not concerned with sexual “phantasy” they are concerned with “reality,” and boys are expected to achieve personal autonomy and identity by “committing themselves in the sphere of our culture that is most morally worthwhile—the world of work—in which they will be acknowledged as persons with recognized achievements and potentials.” Even if the boys’ own vocational images and goals are not realistic in the beginning—and this study showed that they were not—the sex-directed educators recognize, for boys, that motives, goals, interests, childish preconceptions, can change. They also recognize that, for most, the crucial last chance for change is in college. But apparently girls are not expected to change, nor are they given the opportunity. Even at coeducational colleges, very few girls get the same education as boys. Instead of stimulating what psychologists have suggested might be a “latent” desire for autonomy in the girls, the sex-directed educators stimulated their sexual fantasy of fulfilling all desire for achievement, status, and identity vicariously through a man. Instead of challenging the girls’ childish, rigid, parochial preconception of woman’s role, they cater to it by offering them a potpourri of liberal-arts courses, suitable only for a wifely veneer, or narrow programs such as “institutional dietetics,” well beneath their abilities and suitable only for a “stopgap” job between college and marriage.

  As educators themselves admit, women’s college training does not often equip them to enter the business or professional world at a meaningful level, either at graduation or afterward; it is not geared to career possibilities that would justify the planning and work required for higher professional training. For women, the sex-directed educators say with approval, college is the place to find a man. Presumably, if the campus is “the world’s best marriage mart,” as one educator remarked, both sexes are affected. On college campuses today, professor and student agree, the girls are the aggressors in the marriage hunt. The boys, married or not, are there to stretch their minds, to find their own identity, to fill out their life plan; the girls are there only to fulfill their sexual function.

  Research reveals that ninety per cent or more of the rising number of campus wives who were motivated for marriage by “phantasy and the need to conform” are literally working their husbands’ way through college.17 The girl who quits high school or college to marry and have a baby, or to take a job to work her husband’s way through, is stunted from the kind of mental growth and understanding that higher education is supposed to give, as surely as child labor used to stunt the physical growth of children. She is also prevented from realistic preparation and planning for a career or a commitment that will utilize her abilities and will be of some importance to society and herself.

  During the period when the sex-directed educators were devoting themselves to women’s sexual adjustment and femininity, economists charted a new and revolutionary change in American employment: beneath the ebb and flow of boom and recession, they found an absolute, spiraling decline in employment possibilities for the uneducated and the unskilled. But when the government economists on the “Womanpower” study visited college campuses, they found the girls unaffected by the statistical probability that they will spend twenty-five years or more of their adult lives in jobs outside the home. Even when it is virtually certain that most women will no longer spend their lives as full-time housewives, the sex-directed educators have told them not to plan for a career for fear of hampering their sexual adjustment.

  A few years ago, sex-directed education finally infiltrated a famous women’s college, which had been proud in the past of its large share of graduates who went on to play leading roles in education and law and medicine, the arts and sciences, government and social welfare. This college had an ex-feminist woman president, who was perhaps beginning to suffer a slight guilt at the thought of all those women educated like men. A questionnaire, sent to alumnae of all ages, indicated that the great majority were satisfied with their non-sex-directed education; but a minority complained that their education had made them overly conscious of women’s rights and equality with men, too interested in careers, possessed of a nagging feeling that they should do something in the community, that they should at least keep on reading, studying, developing their own abilities and interests. Why hadn’t they been educated to be happy housewives and mothers?

  The guilty woman college president—guilty personally of being a college president, besides having a large number of children and a successful husband; guilty also of having been an ardent feminist in her time and of having advanced a good way in her career before she married; barraged by the therapeutic social scientists who accused her of trying to mold these young girls in her own impossible, unrealistic, outmoded, energetic, self-demanding, visionary, unfeminine image—introduced a functional course in marriage and the family, compulsory for all sophomores.

  The circumstances which led to the college’s decision, two years later, to drop that functional course are shrouded in secrecy. Nobody officially connected with the college will talk. But a neighboring educator, a functionalist crusader himself, said with a certain contempt for naive wrong-thinking that they were evidently shocked over there that the girls who took the functional course got married so quickly. (The class of 1959 at that college included a record number of 75 wives, nearly a quarter of the girls who still remained in the class.) He told me calmly:

  Why should it upset them, over there, that the girls got married a little early? There’s nothing wrong with early marriage, with the proper preparation. I guess they can’t get over the old notion that women should be educated to develop their minds. They deny it, but one can’t help suspecting that they still believe in careers for women. Unfortunately, the idea that women go to college to get a husband is anathema to some educators.

  At the college in question, “Marriage and the Family” is taught once again as a course in sociology, geared to critical analysis of these changing social institutions, and not to functional action, or group therapy. But in the neighboring institution, my professor-informant is second in command of a booming department of “family-life education,” which is currently readying a hundred graduate students to teach functional marriage courses in colleges, state teachers’ colleges, junior colleges, community colleges, and high schools across America. One senses that these new sex-directed educators do indeed think of themselves as crusaders—crusaders against the old nontherapeutic, nonfunctional values of the intellect, against the old, demanding, sexless education, which confined itself to the life of the mind and the pursuit of truth, and never even tried to help girls pursue a man, have orgasms, or adjust. As my informant elaborated:

  These kids are concerned about dating and sex, how to get along with boys, is it all right to have premarital relations. Maybe a girl is trying to decide about her major; she’s thinking about a career, and she’s also thinking about marriag
e. You set up a role-playing situation to help her work it out—so she sees the effect on the children. She sees she need not feel guilty about being just a housewife.

  There often is an air of defensiveness, when a sex-directed educator is asked to define, for the uninitiated, the “functional approach.” One told a reporter:

  It’s all very well to talk big talk—intellectual generalizations, abstract concepts, the United Nations—but somewhere we have to start facing these problems of interpersonal relations on a more modest scale. We have to stop being so teacher-centered, and become student-centered. It’s not what you think they need, but what they think they need. That’s the functional approach. You walk into a class, and your aim is no longer to cover a certain content, but to set up an atmosphere that makes your students feel comfortable and talk freely about interpersonal relations, in basic terms, not highfalutin generalizations.

  Kids tend in adolescence to be very idealistic. They think they can acquire a different set of values, marry a boy from a different background, and that it won’t matter later on. We make them aware it will matter, so they won’t walk so lightly into mixed marriages, and other traps.18

  The reporter asked why “Mate Selection,” “Adjustment to Marriage” and “Education for Family Living” are taught in colleges at all, if the teacher is committed not to teach, if no material is to be learned or covered, and if the only aim is to help the student understand personal problems and emotions. After surveying a number of marriage courses for Mademoiselle, she concluded: “Only in America would you overhear one undergraduate say to another with total ingenuousness, ‘You should have been in class today. We talked about male role-playing and a couple of people really opened up and got personal.’”

  The point of role-playing, a technique adapted from group therapy, is to get students to understand problems “on a feeling level.” Emotions more heady than those of the usual college classroom are undoubtedly stirred up when the professor invites them to “role-play” the feelings of “a boy and a girl on their wedding night.”

  There is a pseudotherapeutic air, as the professor listens patiently to endless self-conscious student speeches about personal feelings (“verbalizing”) in the hopes of sparking a “group insight.” But though the functional course is not group therapy, it is certainly an indoctrination of opinions and values through manipulation of the students’ emotions; and in this manipulative disguise, it is no longer subject to the critical thinking demanded in other academic disciplines.

  The students take as gospel the bits and pieces assigned in text books that explain Freud or quote Margaret Mead; they do not have the frame of reference that comes from the actual study of psychology or anthropology. In fact, by explicitly banning the usual critical attitudes of college study, these pseudoscientific marriage courses give what is often no more than popular opinion, the fiat of scientific law. The opinion may be currently fashionable, or already outdated, in psychiatric circles, but it is often merely a prejudice, buttressed by psychological or sociological jargon and well-chosen statistics to give the appearance of unquestionable scientific truth.

  The discussion on premarital intercourse usually leads to the scientific conclusion that it is wrong. One professor builds up his case against sexual intercourse before marriage with statistics chosen to demonstrate that premarital sexual experience tends to make marital adjustment more difficult. The student will not know of the other statistics which refute this point; if the professor knows of them, he can in the functional marriage course feel free to disregard them as unfunctional. (“Ours is a sick society. The students need some accurate definitive kind of knowledge.”) It is functional “knowledge” that “only the exceptional woman can make a go of a commitment to a career.” Of course, since most women in the past have not had careers, the few who did were all “exceptional”—as a mixed marriage is “exceptional,” and premarital intercourse for a girl is exceptional. All are phenomena of less than 51 per cent. The whole point of functional education often seems to be: what 51 per cent of the population does today, 100 per cent should do tomorrow.

  So the sex-directed educator promotes a girl’s adjustment by dissuading her from any but the “normal” commitment to marriage and the family. One such educator goes farther than imaginary role-playing; she brings real ex-working mothers to class to talk about their guilt at leaving their children in the morning. Somehow, the students seldom hear about a woman who has successfully broken convention—the young woman doctor whose sister handled her practice when her babies were born, the mother who adjusted her babies’ sleeping hours to her work schedule without problems, the happy Protestant girl who married a Catholic, the sexually serene wife whose premarital experience did not seem to hurt her marriage. “Exceptional” cases are of no practical concern to the functionalist, though he often acknowledges scrupulously that there are exceptions. (The “exceptional child,” in educational jargon, bears a connotation of handicap: the blind, the crippled, the retarded, the genius, the defier of convention—anyone who is different from the crowd, in any way unique—bears a common shame; he is “exceptional.”) Somehow, the student gets the point that she does not want to be the “exceptional woman.”

  Conformity is built into life-adjustment education in many ways. There is little or no intellectual challenge or discipline involved in merely learning to adjust. The marriage course is the easiest course on almost every campus, no matter how anxiously professors try to toughen it by assigning heavy reading and weekly reports. No one expects that case histories (which when read for no serious use are not much more than psychiatric soap operas), role-playing, talking about sex in class, or writing personal papers will lead to critical thinking; that’s not the point of functional preparation for marriage.

  This is not to say that the study of a social science, as such, produces conformity in woman or man. This is hardly the effect when it is studied critically and motivated by the usual aims of intellectual discipline, or when it is mastered for professional use. But for girls forbidden both professional and intellectual commitment by the new mystique, the study of sociology, anthropology, psychology is often merely “functional.” And in the functional course itself, the girls take those bits and pieces from Freud and Mead, the sexual statistics, the role-playing insights, not only literally and out of context, but personally—to be acted upon in their own lives. That, after all, is the whole point of life-adjustment education. It can happen among adolescents in almost any course that involves basic emotional material. It will certainly happen when the material is deliberately used not to build critical knowledge but to stir up personal emotions. Therapy, in the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition, requires the suppression of critical thinking (intellectual resistance) for the proper emotions to come out and be worked through. In therapy, this may work. But does education work, mixed up with therapy? One course could hardly be crucial, in any man or woman’s life, but when it is decided that the very aim of woman’s education should not be intellectual growth, but sexual adjustment, certain questions could be very crucial.

  One might ask: if an education geared to the growth of the human mind weakens femininity, will an education geared to femininity weaken the growth of the mind? What is femininity, if it can be destroyed by an education which makes the mind grow, or induced by not letting the mind grow?

  One might even ask a question in Freudian terms: what happens when sex becomes not only id for women, but ego and superego as well; when education, instead of developing the self, is concentrated on developing the sexual functions? What happens when education gives new authority to the feminine “shoulds”—which already have the authority of tradition, convention, prejudice, popular opinion—instead of giving women the power of critical thought, the independence and autonomy to question blind authority, new or old? At Pembroke, the women’s college at Brown University in Providence, R.I., a guest psychoanalyst was recently invited to lead a buzz session on “what it means to be a woman.” T
he students seemed disconcerted when the guest analyst, Dr. Margaret Lawrence, said, in simple, un-Freudian English, that it was rather silly to tell women today that their main place is in the home, when most of the work women used to do is now done outside the home, and everyone else in the family spends most of his time outside the house. Hadn’t they better be educated to join the rest of the family, out there in the world?

  This, somehow, was not what the girls expected to hear from a lady psychoanalyst. Unlike the usual functional, sex-directed lesson, it upset a conventional feminine “should.” It also implied that they should begin to make certain decisions of their own, about their education and their future.

  The functional lesson is much more soothing to the unsure sophomore who has not yet quite made the break from childhood. It does not defy the comfortable, safe conventions; it gives her sophisticated words for accepting her parents’ view, the popular view, without having to figure out views of her own. It also reassures her that she doesn’t have to work in college; that she can be lazy, follow impulse. She doesn’t have to postpone present pleasure for future goals; she doesn’t have to read eight books for a history paper, take the tough physics course. It might give her a masculinity complex. After all, didn’t the book say:

  Woman’s intellectuality is to a large extent paid for by the loss of valuable feminine qualities…. All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.19