The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  A girl doesn’t have to be very lazy, very unsure, to take the hint. Thinking, after all, is hard work. In fact, she would have to do some very cold hard thinking about her own warm, intuitive knowledge to challenge this authoritative statement.

  It is no wonder that several generations of American college girls of fine mind and fiery spirit took the message of the sex-directed educators, and fled college and career to marry and have babies before they became so “intellectual” that, heaven forbid, they wouldn’t be able to enjoy sex “in a feminine way.”

  Even without the help of sex-directed educators, the girl growing up with brains and spirit in America learns soon enough to watch her step, “to be like all the others,” not to be herself. She learns not to work too hard, think too often, ask too many questions. In high schools, in coeducational colleges, girls are reluctant to speak out in class for fear of being typed as “brains.” This phenomenon has been borne out by many studies;20 any bright girl or woman can document it from personal experience. Bryn Mawr girls have a special term for the way they talk when boys are around, compared to the real talk they can permit themselves when they are not afraid to let their intelligence show. In the coeducational colleges, girls are regarded by others—and think of themselves—primarily in terms of their sexual function as dates, future wives. They “seek my security in him” instead of finding themselves, and each act of self-betrayal tips the scale further away from identity to passive self-contempt.

  There are exceptions, of course. The Mellon study found that some Vassar seniors, as compared with freshmen, showed an enormous growth in four years—the kind of growth toward identity and self-realization which scientists now know takes place in people in their twenties and even thirties, forties, and fifties, long after the period of physical growth is over. But many girls showed no signs of growth. These were the ones who resisted, successfully, involvement with ideas, the academic work of the college, the intellectual disciplines, the larger values. They resisted intellectual development, self-development, in favor of being “feminine,” not too brainy, not too interested, not too different from the other girls. It was not that their actual sexual interests interfered; in fact, the psychologists got the impression that with many of these girls, “interest in men and marriage is a kind of defense against intellectual development.” For such girls, even sex is not real, merely a kind of conformity. The sex-directed educator would find no fault in this kind of adjustment. But in view of other evidence, one might ask: could such an adjustment mask a failure to grow that becomes finally a human deformity?

  Several years ago a team of California psychologists who had been following the development of 140 bright youngsters noticed a sudden sharp drop in IQ curves in some of the teenage records. When they investigated this, they found that while most of the youngsters’ curves remained at the same high level, year after year, those whose curves dropped were all girls. The drop had nothing to do with the physiological changes of adolescence; it was not found in all girls. But in the records of those girls whose intelligence dropped were found repeated statements to the effect that “it isn’t too smart for a girl to be smart.” In a very real sense, these girls were arrested in their mental growth, at age fourteen or fifteen, by conformity to the feminine image.21

  The fact is, girls today and those responsible for their education do face a choice. They must decide between adjustment, conformity, avoidance of conflict, therapy—or individuality, human identity, education in the truest sense, with all its pains of growth. But they do not have to face the mistaken choice painted by the sex-directed educators, with their dire warnings against loss of femininity and sexual frustration. For the perceptive psychologist who studied the Vassar girls uncovered some startling new evidence about the students who chose to become truly involved with their education. It seems that those seniors who showed the greatest signs of growth were more “masculine” in the sense of being less passive and conventional; but they were more “feminine” in inner emotional life, and the ability to gratify it. They also scored higher, far higher than as freshmen, on certain scales commonly supposed to measure neuroses. The psychologist commented: “We have come to regard elevations on such scales as evidence that education is taking place.”22 He found girls with conflicts showed more growth than the adjusted ones, who had no wish to become independent. The least adjusted were also the more developed—“already prepared for even further changes and more independence.” In summing up the Vassar study, its director could not avoid the psychological paradox: education for women does make them less feminine, less adjusted—but it makes them grow.

  Being less “feminine” is closely related to being more educated and more mature…. It is interesting to note, however, that Feminine Sensitivity, which may well have sources in physiology and in early identifications, does not decrease during the four years; “feminine” interests and feminine role behavior, i.e., conventionality and passivity, can be understood as later and more superficial acquisitions, and, hence, more susceptible to decrease as the individual becomes more mature and more educated….

  One might say that if we were interested in stability alone, we would do well to plan a program to keep freshmen as they are, rather than to try to increase their education, their maturity and their flexibility with regard to sex-role behavior. Seniors are more unstable because there is more to be stabilized, less certain of their identities because more possibilities are open to them.23

  At graduation, such women were, however, only at a “halfway point” in their growth to autonomy. Their fate depended on “whether they now enter a situation in which they can continue to grow or whether they find some quick but regressive means for relieving the stress.” The flight into marriage is the easiest, quickest way to relieve that stress. To the educator, bent on women’s growth to autonomy, such a marriage is “regressive.” To the sex-directed educator, it is femininity fulfilled.

  A therapist at another college told me of girls who had never committed themselves, either to their work or any other activity of the college and who felt that they would “go to pieces” when their parents refused to let them leave college to marry the boys in whom they found “security.” When these girls, with help, finally applied themselves to work—or even began to feel a sense of self by taking part in an activity such as student government or the school newspaper—they lost their desperate need for “security.” They finished college, worked, went out with more mature young men, and are now marrying on quite a different emotional basis.

  Unlike the sex-directed educator, this professional therapist felt that the girl who suffers almost to the point of breakdown in the senior year, and who faces a personal decision about her own future—faces even an irreconcilable conflict between the values and interests and abilities her education has given her, and the conventional role of housewife—is still “healthier” than the adjusted, calm, stable girl in whom education did not “take” at all and who steps smoothly from her role as parents’ child to husband’s wife, conventionally feminine, without ever waking up to painful individual identity.

  And yet the fact is, today most girls do not let their education “take” they stop themselves before getting this close to identity. I could see this in the girls at Smith, and the girls I interviewed from other colleges. It was clear in the Vassar research. The Vassar study showed that just as girls begin to feel the conflicts, the growing pains of identity, they stop growing. They more or less consciously stop their own growth to play the feminine role. Or, to put it in another way, they evade further experiences conducive to growth. Until now this stunting or evasion of growth has been considered normal feminine adjustment. But when the Vassar study followed women past the senior year—where they were on the verge of this painful crucial step in personal growth—out into life, where most of them were playing the conventional feminine role, these facts emerged:

  Twenty or twenty-five years out of college, these women measured lower than seniors on th
e “Development Scale” which covered the whole gamut of mental, emotional, and personal growth. They did not lose all the growth achieved in college (alumnae scored higher than freshmen) but—in spite of the psychological readiness for further growth at twenty-one—they did not keep growing.

  These women were, for the most part, adjusted as suburban housewives, conscientious mothers, active in their communities. But, except for the professional career women, they had not continued to pursue deep interests of their own. There seemed some reason to believe that the cessation of growth was related to the lack of deep personal interests, the lack of an individual commitment.

  The women who, twenty years later, were most troubling to the psychologist were the most conventionally feminine—the ones who were not interested, even in college, in anything except finding a husband.24

  In the Vassar study there was one group of students who in senior year neither suffered conflict to the point of near-breakdown nor stopped their own growth to flee into marriage. These were students who were preparing for a profession; they had gained, in college, interests deep enough to commit themselves to a career. The study revealed that virtually all such students with professional ambitions plan to marry, but marriage is for them an activity in which they will voluntarily choose to participate rather than something that is necessary for any sense of personal identity. Such students have a clear sense of direction, a greater degree of independence and self-confidence than most. They may be engaged or deeply in love, but they do not feel they must sacrifice their own individualities or their career ambitions if they wish to marry. With these girls, the psychologists did not get the impression, as they did with so many, that interest in men and in marriage was a kind of defense against intellectual development. Their interest in some particular man was real. At the same time, it did not interfere with their education.

  But the degree to which the feminine mystique has brainwashed American educators was shown when the director of the Vassar study described to a panel of his colleagues such a girl, who “not only makes top grades, but in whose case there is high probability that a scholarly or professional career will be followed.”

  Julie B’s mother is a teacher and scholar and the driving force in the family…. Mother gets after father for being too easygoing. Father doesn’t mind if his wife and daughter have high-brow tastes and ideas, only such are not for him. Julie becomes out-door girl, nonconformist, dominates her older brother, but is conscience-stricken if she doesn’t do required reading or if grade average slips. Sticks to her intention to do graduate work and become teacher. Older brother now college teacher and Julie, herself a graduate student now, is married to a graduate student in natural science.

  When she was a freshman we presented her interview data, without interpretation, to a group of psychiatrists, psychologists, social scientists. Our idea of a really promising girl. Common question: “What’s wrong with her?” Common opinion: she would need psychotherapy. Actually she got engaged to her budding scientist in her sophomore year, became increasingly conscious of herself as an intellectual and outsider, but still couldn’t neglect her work. “If only I could flunk something,” she said.

  It takes a very daring educator today to attack the sex-directed line, for he must challenge, in essence, the conventional image of femininity. The image says that women are passive, dependent, conformist, incapable of critical thought or original contribution to society; and in the best traditions of the self-fulfilling prophecy, sex-directed education continues to make them so, as in an earlier era, lack of education made them so. No one asks whether a passively feminine, uncomplicated, dependent woman—in a primitive village or in a suburb—actually enjoys greater happiness, greater sexual fulfillment than a woman who commits herself in college to serious interests beyond the home. No one, until very recently when Russians orbited moons and men in space, asked whether adjustment should be education’s aim. In fact, the sex-directed educators, so bent on women’s feminine adjustment, could gaily cite the most ominous facts about American housewives—their emptiness, idleness, boredom, alcoholism, drug addiction, disintegration to fat, disease, and despair after forty, when their sexual function has been filled—without deviating a bit from their crusade to educate all women to this sole end.

  So the sex-directed educator disposes of the thirty years women are likely to live after forty with three blithe proposals:

  A course in “Law and Order for the Housewife” to enable her to deal, as a widow, with insurances, taxes, wills, investments.

  Men might retire earlier to help keep their wives company.

  A brief fling in “volunteer community services, politics, the arts or the like”—though, since the woman will be untrained the main value will be personal therapy. “To choose only one example, a woman who wants some really novel experience may start a campaign to rid her city or country of that nauseous eczema of our modern world, the billboard.

  “The billboards will remain and multiply like bacteria infesting the landscape, but at least she will have had a vigorous adult education course in local politics. Then she can relax and devote herself to the alumnae activities of the institution from which she graduated. Many a woman approaching middle years has found new vigor and enthusiasm in identifying herself with the on-going life of her college and in expanding her maternal instincts, now that her own children are grown, to encompass the new generations of students which inhabit its campus.”25

  She could also take a part-time job, he said, but she shouldn’t take work away from men who must feed their families, and, in fact, she won’t have the skills or experience for a very “exciting” job.

  …there is great demand for experienced and reliable women who can relieve younger women of family responsibilities on regular days or afternoons, so that they may either develop community interests or hold part-time jobs of their own…. There is no reason why women of culture and breeding, who in any case for years have probably done most of their own housework, should recoil from such arrangements.26

  If the feminine mystique has not destroyed her sense of humor, a woman might laugh at such a candid description of the life her expensive sex-directed education fits her for: an occasional alumnae reunion and someone else’s housework. The sad fact is, in the era of Freud and functionalism and the feminine mystique, few educators escaped such a sex-distortion of their own values. Max Lerner,27 even Riesman in The Lonely Crowd, suggested that women need not seek their own autonomy through productive contribution to society—they might better help their husbands hold on to theirs, through play. And so sex-directed education segregated recent generations of able American women as surely as separate-but-equal education segregated able American Negroes from the opportunity to realize their full abilities in the mainstream of American life.

  It does not explain anything to say that in this era of conformity colleges did not really educate anybody. The Jacob report,28 which leveled this indictment against American colleges generally, and even the more sophisticated indictment by Sanford and his group, does not recognize that the colleges’ failure to educate women for an identity beyond their sexual role was undoubtedly a crucial factor in perpetuating, if not creating, that conformity which educators now so fashionably rail against. For it is impossible to educate women to devote themselves so early and completely to their sexual role—women who, as Freud said, can be very active indeed in achieving a passive end—without pulling men into the same comfortable trap. In effect, sex-directed education led to a lack of identity in women most easily solved by early marriage. And a premature commitment to any role—marriage or vocation—closes off the experiences, the testing, the failures and successes in various spheres of activity that are necessary for a person to achieve full maturity, individual identity.

  The danger of stunting of boys’ growth by early domesticity was recognized by the sex-directed educators. As Margaret Mead put it recently:

  Early domesticity has always been characteristic of m
ost savages, of most peasants and of the urban poor…. If there are babies, it means, you know, the father’s term paper gets all mixed up with the babies’ bottle…. Early student marriage is domesticating boys so early they don’t have a chance for full intellectual development. They don’t have a chance to give their entire time, not necessarily to study in the sense of staying in the library—but in the sense that the married students don’t have time to experience, to think, to sit up all night in bull sessions, to develop as individuals. This is not only important for the intellectuals, but also the boys who are going to be the future statesmen of the country and lawyers and doctors and all sorts of professional men.29

  But what of the girls who will never even write the term papers because of the baby’s bottle? Because of the feminine mystique, few have seen it as a tragedy that they thereby trap themselves in that one passion, one occupation, one role for life. Advanced educators in the early 1960’s have their own cheerful fantasies about postponing women’s education until after they have had their babies; they thereby acknowledge that they have resigned themselves almost unanimously to the early marriages, which continue unabated.

  But by choosing femininity over the painful growth to full identity, by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality, these girls are doomed to suffer ultimately that bored, diffuse feeling of purposelessness, nonexistence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name.

  Still, it is too easy to make education the scapegoat. Whatever the mistakes of the sex-directed educators, other educators have fought a futile, frustrating rear-guard battle trying to make able women “envision new goals and grow by reaching for them.” In the last analysis, millions of able women in this free land chose, themselves, not to use the door education could have opened for them. The choice—and the responsibility—for the race back home was finally their own.