The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  Her anxiousness about her daughter and what she was doing was her own anxiety about herself, and what she wasn’t doing. When these women suffer with the preoccupation of what they aren’t doing with themselves, the children actually get very little real contact with them. I think of another child, 2 years old, with very severe symptoms because he has almost no actual contact with his mother. She is very much in the home, all day, every day. I have to teach her to have even physical contact with the child. But it won’t be solved until the mother faces her own need for self-fulfillment. Being available to one’s children has nothing to do with the amount of time—being able to be there for each child in terms of what he needs can happen in a split second. And a mother can be there all day, and not be there for the child, because of her preoccupation with herself. So he holds his breath in temper tantrums; he fights in anger; he refuses to let her leave him at nursery school; even at 9 a boy still requires his mother to go to the bathroom with him, lie down with him or he can’t go to sleep. Or he becomes withdrawn to the point of schizophrenia. And she is frantically trying to answer the child’s needs and demands. But if she was really able to fulfill herself, she would be able to be there for her child. She has to be complete herself, and there herself, to help the child to grow, and learn to handle reality, even to know what his own real feelings are.

  In another clinic, a therapist spoke of a mother who was panicky because her child could not learn to read at school, though his intelligence tested high. The mother had left college, thrown herself into the role of housewife, and had lived for the time when her son would go to school, and she would fulfill herself in his achievement. Until therapy made the mother “separate” herself from the child, he had no sense of himself as a separate being at all. He could, would, do nothing, even in play, unless someone told him to. He could not even learn to read, which took a self of his own.

  The strange thing was, the therapist said, like so many other women of this era of the “feminine role,” in her endeavor to be a “real woman,” a good wife and mother, “she was really playing a very masculine role…. She was pushing everyone around—dominating the children’s lives, ruling the house with an iron hand, managing the carpentry, nagging her husband to do odd jobs he never finished, managing the finances, supervising the recreation and the education—and her husband was just the man who paid the bills.”

  In a Westchester community whose school system is world famous, it was recently discovered that graduates with excellent high-school records did very poorly in college and did not make much of themselves afterwards. An investigation revealed a simple psychological cause. All during high school, the mothers literally had been doing their children’s homework and term papers. They had been cheating their sons and daughters out of their own mental growth.

  Another analyst illuminates how juvenile delinquency is caused by the child’s acting out of the mother’s needs, when the mother’s growth has been stunted.

  Regularly the more important parent—usually the mother, although the father is always in some way involved—has been seen unconsciously to encourage the amoral or antisocial behavior of the child. The neurotic needs of the parent…are vicariously gratified by the behavior of the child. Such neurotic needs of the parent exist either because of some current inability to satisfy them in the world of adults, or because of the stunting experiences in the parent’s own childhood—or more commonly, because of a combination of both of these factors.11

  Those who have observed and tried to help young delinquents have seen this progressive dehumanization process in action, and have discovered that love is not enough to counteract it. The symbiotic love or permissiveness which has been the translation of mother love during the years of the feminine mystique is not enough to create a social conscience and strength of character in a child. For this it takes a mature mother with a firm core of self, whose own sexual, instinctual needs are integrated with social conscience. “Firmness bespeaks a parent who has learned…how all of his major goals may be reached in some creative course of action…”12

  A therapist reported the case of a nine-year-old girl who stole. She will outgrow it, said her protective mother—with a “permissiveness born of her own need for vicarious satisfaction.” At one point, the nine-year-old asked the therapist, “When is my mother going to do her own stealing?”

  At its most extreme, this pattern of progressive dehumanization can be seen in the cases of schizophrenic children: “autistic” or “atypical” children, as they are sometimes called. I visited a famous clinic which has been studying these children for almost twenty years. During this period, cases of these children, arrested at a very primitive, sub-infantile level, have seemed to some to be on the increase. The authorities differ as to the cause of this strange condition, and whether it is actually on the increase or only seems to be because it is now more often diagnosed. Until quite recently, most of these children were thought to be mentally retarded. But the condition is being seen more frequently now, in hospitals and clinics, by doctors and psychiatrists. And it is not the same as the irreversible, organic types of mental retardation. It can be treated, and sometimes cured.

  These children often identify themselves with things, inanimate objects—cars, radios, etc., or with animals—pigs, dogs, cats. The crux of the problem seems to be that these children have not organized or developed strong enough selves to cope even with the child’s reality; they cannot distinguish themselves as separate from the outside world; they live on the level of things or of instinctual biological impulse that has not been organized into a human framework at all. As for the causes, the authorities felt they “must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being.”13

  At the clinic I visited (The James Jackson Putnam Children’s Center in Boston) the workers were cautions about drawing conclusions about these profoundly disturbed children. But one of the doctors said, a bit impatiently, about the increasing stream of “missing egos, fragile egos, poorly developed selves” that he has encountered—“It’s just the thing we’ve always known, if the parent has a fragile ego, the child will.”

  Most of the mothers of the children who never developed a core of human self were “extremely immature individuals” themselves, though on the surface they “give the impression of being well-adjusted.” They were very dependent on their own mothers, fled this dependency into early marriage, and “have struggled heroically to build and maintain the image they have created of a fine woman, wife and mother.”

  The need to be a mother, the hope and expectation that through this experience she may become a real person, capable of true emotions, is so desperate that of itself it may create anxiety, ambivalence, fear of failure. Because she is so barren of spontaneous manifestations of maternal feelings, she studies vigilantly all the new methods of upbringing and reads treatises about physical and mental hygiene.14

  Her omnipresent care of her child is based not on spontaneity but on following the “picture of what a good mother should be,” in the hope that “through identification with the child, her own flesh and blood, she may experience vicariously the joys of real living, of genuine feeling.”

  And thus, the child is reduced from “passive inertia” to “screaming in the night” to non-humanness. “The passive child is less of a threat because he does not make exaggerated demands on the mother, who feels constantly in danger of revealing that emotionally she has little or nothing to offer, that she is a fraud.” When she discovers that she cannot really find her own fulfillment through the child:

  …she fights desperately for control, no longer of herself perhaps, but of the child. The struggles over toilet training and weaning are generally battles in which she tries to redeem herself. The child becomes the real victim—victim of the mother’s helplessness which, in turn, creates an aggression in her that mounts to destruction. The only way for the child to survive is to retreat,
to withdraw, not only from the dangerous mother, but from the whole world as well.”15

  And so he becomes a “thing,” or an animal, or “a restless wanderer in search of no one and no place, weaving about the room, swaying back and forth, circling the walls as if they were bars he would break through.”

  In this clinic, the doctors were often able to trace a similar pattern back several generations. The dehumanization was indeed progressive.

  In view of these clinical observations, we may assume that the conflict we have discovered in two generations may well have existed for generations before and will continue in those to come, unless the pattern is interrupted by therapeutic intervention or the child rescued by a masculine father-figure, a hope which our experience would not lead us to expect.16

  But neither therapy nor love was enough to help these children, if the mother continued to live vicariously through the child. I noticed this same pattern in many of the women I interviewed, women who dominated their daughters, or bred them into passive dependence and conformity or unconsciously pushed them into sexual activities. One of the most tragic women I interviewed was the mother of that “sleepwalking” thirteen-year-old girl. A wealthy executive’s wife whose life was filled with all the trappings, she lived the very image of suburban “togetherness,” except that it was only a shell. Her husband’s real life was centered in his business; a life that he could not, or would not, share with his wife. She had sought to recapture her sense of life by unconsciously pushing her thirteen-year-old daughter into promiscuity. She lived in her daughter’s pseudo-sex life, which for the girl was so devoid of actual feeling that she became in it merely a “thing.”

  Quite a few therapists and counselors were trying to “help” the mother and the father, on the premise, I suppose, that if the mother’s sexual-emotional needs were filled in her marriage by her husband, she would not need to solve them through her daughter—and her daughter could grow out of the “thingness” to womanhood herself. It was because the husband had so many problems of his own and the prospects of the mother ever getting enough love from him looked dim, that the counselors were trying to get the mother to develop some real interests in her own life.

  But with other women I have encountered who have evaded their own growth in vicarious living and lack of personal purposes, not even the most loving of husbands have managed to stop the progressive damage to their own lives and the lives of their children. I have seen what happens when women unconsciously push their daughters into too early sexuality, because the sexual adventure was the only real adventure—or means of achieving status or identity—in their own lives. Today these daughters, who acted out their mothers’ dreams or frustrated ambitions in the “normal” feminine way and hitched their wagons to the rising stars of ambitious, able men, are, in too many cases, as frustrated and unfulfilled as their mothers. They do not all rush barefoot to the police station for fear they will murder the husband and baby who, they think, trap them in that house. All their sons do not become violent menaces in the neighborhood and at school; all their daughters do not act out their mothers’ sexual phantasies and become pregnant at fourteen. Nor do all such housewives begin drinking at 11 A.M. to hide the clunking whir of the dishwasher, the washing machine, the dryer, that are finally the only sounds of life in that empty house, as the children, one by one, go off to school.

  But in suburbs like Bergen County, the rate of “separations” increased a wild 100% during the 1950’s, as the able, ambitious men kept on growing in the city while their wives evaded growth in vicarious living or noncommitment, fulfilling their feminine role at home. As long as the children were home, as long as the husband was there, the wives suffered increasingly severe illnesses, but recovered. But in Bergen County, during this decade, there was a drastic increase in suicides of women over forty-five, and of hospitalized women psychiatric patients whose children had grown up and left home.17 The housewives who had to be hospitalized and who did not recover quickly were, above all, those who had never developed their own abilities in work outside the home.18

  The massive breakdown that may take place as more and more of these new young housewife-mothers who are the products of the feminine mystique reach their forties is still a matter of speculation. But the progressive infantilization of their sons and daughters, as it is mirrored in the rash of early marriages, has become an alarming fact. In March, 1962, at the national conference of the Child Study Association, the new early marriages and parenthood, which had formerly been considered an indication of “improved emotional maturity” in the younger generation were at last recognized as a sign of increasing “infantilization.” The millions of American youngsters who, in the 1960’s, were marrying before they were twenty, betrayed an immaturity and emotional dependence which seeks marriage as a magic short-cut to adult status, a magic solution to problems they cannot face themselves, professionals in the child-and-family field agreed. These infantile brides and grooms were diagnosed as the victims of this generation’s “sick, sad love affair with their own children.”

  Many girls will admit that they want to get married because they do not want to work any longer. They harbor dreams of being taken care of for the rest of their lives without worry, with just enough furnishing, to do little housework, interesting downtown shopping trips, happy children, and nice neighbors. The dream of a husband seems somehow less important but in the fantasies of girls about marriage, it usually concerns a man who has the strength of an indestructible, reliable, powerful father, and the gentleness, givingness, and self-sacrificing love of a good mother. Young men give as their reason for wanting to marry very often the desire to have a motherly woman in the house, and regular sex just for the asking without trouble and bother…. In fact, what is supposed to secure maturity and independence is in reality a concealed hope to secure dependency, to prolong the child-parent relationship with the privileges of being a child, and with as little as possible of its limitations.19

  And there were other ominous signs across the nation of mounting uncontrollable violence among young parents and their children trapped in that passive dependence. A psychiatrist reported that such wives were reacting to hostility from their husbands by becoming even more dependent and passive, until they sometimes became literally unable to move, to take a step, by themselves. This did not make their husbands treat them with more love, but more rage. And what was happening to the rage the wives did not dare to use against their husbands? Consider this recent news item (Time, July 20, 1962) about the “Battered-Child Syndrome.”

  To many doctors, the incident is becoming distressingly familiar. A child, usually under three, is brought to the office with multiple fractures—often including a fractured skull. The parents express appropriate concern, report that the child fell out of bed, or tumbled down the stairs, or was injured by a playmate. But x-rays and experience lead the doctor to a different conclusion: the child has been beaten by his parents.

  Gathering documentation from 71 hospitals, a University of Colorado team found 302 battered-child cases in a single year; 33 died, 85 suffered permanent brain damage. The parents, who were driven “to kick and punch their children, twist their arms, beat them with hammers or the buckle end of belts, burn them with cigarettes or electric irons,” were as likely to live in those suburban split-levels as in tenements. The A.M.A. predicted that when statistics on the battered-child syndrome are complete, “it is likely that it will be found to be a more frequent cause of death than such well-recognized and thoroughly studied diseases as leukemia, cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.”

  The “parent” with most opportunity to beat that battered child was, of course, the mother. As one young mother of four said to the doctor, as she confessed to the wish to kill herself:

  There doesn’t seem any reason for me to go on living. I don’t have anything to look forward to. Jim and I don’t even talk to each other any more except about the bills and things that need to be fixed in the house. I know he
resents being so old and tied down when he’s still young, and he blames it on me because it was I that wanted us to get married then. But the worst thing is, I feel so envious of my own children. I almost hate them, because they have their lives ahead, and mine is over.

  It may or may not be a symbolic coincidence but the same week the child-and-family profession recognized the real significance of the early marriages, the New York Times Book Review (Sunday, March 18, 1962) recorded a new and unprecedented popularity among American adults of books about “love” affairs between human beings and animals. In half a century, there have not been as many books about animals on the American best-seller lists as in the last three years (1959–62). While animals have always dominated the literature for small children, with maturity human beings become more interested in other human beings. (It is only a symbol, but in the Rorschach test, a preponderance of animal over human images is a sign of infantilism). And so progressive dehumanization has carried the American mind in the last fifteen years from youth worship to that “sick love affair” with our own children; from preoccupation with the physical details of sex, divorced from a human framework, to a love affair between man and animal. Where will it end?

  I think it will not end, as long as the feminine mystique masks the emptiness of the housewife role, encouraging girls to evade their own growth by vicarious living, by noncommitment. We have gone on too long blaming or pitying the mothers who devour their children, who sow the seeds of progressive dehumanization, because they have never grown to full humanity themselves. If the mother is at fault, why isn’t it time to break the pattern by urging all these Sleeping Beauties to grow up and live their own lives? There never will be enough Prince Charmings, or enough therapists to break that pattern now. It is society’s job, and finally that of each woman alone. For it is not the strength of the mothers that is at fault but their weakness, their passive childlike dependency and immaturity that is mistaken for “femininity.” Our society forces boys, insofar as it can, to grow up, to endure the pains of growth, to educate themselves to work, to move on. Why aren’t girls forced to grow up—to achieve somehow the core of self that will end the unnecessary dilemma, the mistaken choice between femaleness and humanness that is implied in the feminine mystique?