The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  There was one thing without which even the most frustrated seldom found their way out of the trap. And, regardless of childhood experience, regardless of luck in marriage, there was one thing that produced frustration in all women of this time who tried to adjust to the housewife image. There was one thing shared by all I encountered who finally found their own way.

  The key to the trap is, of course, education. The feminine mystique has made higher education for women seem suspect, unnecessary and even dangerous. But I think that education, and only education, has saved, and can continue to save, American women from the greater dangers of the feminine mystique.

  In 1957 when I was asked to do an alumnae questionnaire of my own college classmates fifteen years after their graduation from Smith, I seized on the chance, thinking that I could disprove the growing belief that education made women “masculine,” hampered their sexual fulfillment, caused unnecessary conflicts and frustrations. I discovered that the critics were half-right; education was dangerous and frustrating—but only when women did not use it.

  Of the 200 women who answered that questionnaire in 1957, 89 per cent were housewives. They had lived through all the possible frustrations that education can cause in housewives. But when they were asked, “What difficulties have you found in working out your role as a woman?…What are the chief satisfactions and frustrations of your life today?…How have you changed inside?…How do you feel about getting older?…What do you wish you had done differently?…“it was discovered that their real problems, as women, were not caused by their education. In general, they regretted only one thing—that they had not taken their education seriously enough, that they had not planned to put it to serious use.

  Of the 97 per cent of these women who married—usually about three years after college—only 3 per cent had been divorced; of 20 per cent who had been interested in another man since marriage, most “did nothing about it.” As mothers, 86 per cent planned their children’s births and enjoyed their pregnancies; 70 per cent breastfed their babies from one to nine months. They had more children than their mothers (average: 2.94), but only 10 per cent had ever felt “martyred” as mothers. Through 99 per cent reported that sex was only “one factor among many” in their lives, they neither felt over and done with sexually, nor were they just beginning to feel the sexual satisfaction of being a woman. Some 85 per cent reported that sex “gets better with the years,” but they also found it “less important than it used to be.” They shared life with their husbands “as fully as one can with another human being,” but 75 per cent admitted readily that they could not share all of it.

  Most of them (60 per cent) could not honestly say, in reporting their main occupation as homemaker, that they found it “totally fulfilling.” They only spent an average of four hours a day on housework and they did not “enjoy” it. It was perhaps true that their education made them frustrated in their role as housewives. Educated before the era of the feminine mystique, many of them had faced a sharp break from their emerging identity in that housewife role. And yet most of these women continued to grow within the framework of suburban housewifery—perhaps because of the autonomy, the sense of purpose, the commitment to larger values which their education had given them.

  Some 79 per cent had found some way to pursue the goals that education had given them, for the most part within the physical confines of their communities. The old Helen Hokinson caricatures notwithstanding, their assumption of community responsibility was, in general, an act of maturity, a commitment that used and renewed strength of self. For these women, community activity almost always had the stamp of innovation and individuality, rather than the stamp of conformity, status-seeking, or escape. They set up cooperative nursery schools in suburbs where none existed; they started teenage canteens and libraries in schools where Johnny wasn’t reading because, quite simply, there were no good books. They innovated new educational programs that finally became a part of the curriculum. One was personally instrumental in getting 13,000 signatures for a popular referendum to get politics out of the school system. One publicly spoke out for desegregation of schools in the South. One got white children to attend a de facto segregated school in the North. One pushed an appropriation for mental-health clinics through a Western state legislature. One set up museum art programs for school children in each of three cities she had lived in since marriage. Others started or led suburban choral groups, civic theaters, foreign-policy study groups. Thirty per cent were active in local party politics, from the committee level to the state assembly. Over 90 per cent reported that they read the newspaper thoroughly every day and voted regularly. They evidently never watched a daytime television program and seemed almost never to play bridge, or read women’s magazines. Of the fifteen to three hundred books apiece they had read in that one year, half were not best sellers.

  Facing forty, most of these women could report quite frankly that their hair was graying, and their “skin looks faded and tired,” and yet say, with not much regret for lost youth, “I have a growing sense of self-realization, inner serenity and strength.” “I have become more my real self.”

  “How do you visualize your life after your children are grown?” they were asked on the questionnaire. Most of them (60 per cent) had concrete plans for work or study. They planned to finish their education finally, for many who had no career ambitions in college had them now. A few had reached “the depths of bitterness,” “the verge of disillusion and despair,” trying to live just as housewives. A few confessed longingly that “running my house and raising four children does not really use my education or the ability I once seemed to have. If only it were possible to combine motherhood and a career.” And the most bitter were those who said: “Never have found out what kind of a person I am. I wasted college trying to find myself in social life. I wish now that I had gone into something deeply enough to have a creative life of my own.” But most did know, now, who they were and what they wanted to do; and 80 per cent regretted not having planned, seriously, to use their education in professional work. Passive appreciation and even active participation in community affairs would no longer be enough when their children were a little older. Many women reported that they were planning to teach; fortunately for them, the great need for teachers gave them a chance to get back in the stream. Others anticipated years of further study before they would be qualified in their chosen fields.

  These 200 Smith graduates have their counterparts in women all over the country, women of intelligence and ability, fighting their way out of the housewife trap, or never really trapped at all because of their education. But these graduates of 1942 were among the last American women educated before the feminine mystique.

  In another questionnaire answered by almost 10,000 graduates of Mount Holyoke in 1962—its 125th anniversary year—one sees the effect of the mystique on women educated in the last two decades. The Mount Holyoke alumnae showed a similar high marriage and low divorce rate (2 per cent over-all). But before 1942, most were married at twenty-five or older; after 1942, the marriage age showed a dramatic drop, and the percentage having four or more children showed a dramatic rise. Before 1942, two-thirds or more of the graduates went on to further study; that proportion has steadily declined. Few, in recent classes, have won advanced degrees in the arts, sciences, law, medicine, education, compared to the 40 per cent in 1937. A drastically decreasing number also seem to share the larger vistas of national or international commitment; participation in local political clubs had dropped to 12 per cent by the class of 1952. From 1942, on few graduates had any professional affiliation. Half of all the Mount Holyoke alumnae had worked at one time but were no longer working, primarily because they had chosen “the role of housewife.” Some had returned to work—both to supplement income and because they liked to work. But in the classes from 1942 on, where most of the women were now housewives, nearly half did not intend to return to work.

  The declining area of commitment to the world outsid
e the home from 1942 on is a clear indication of the effect of the feminine mystique on educated women. Having seen the desperate emptiness, the “trapped” feeling of many young women who were educated under the mystique to be “just a housewife,” I realize the significance of my classmates’ experience. Because of their education many of them were able to combine serious commitments of their own with marriage and family. They could participate in community activities that required intelligence and responsibility, and move on, with a few years’ preparation, into professional social work or teaching. They could get jobs as substitute teachers or part-time social workers to finance the courses needed for certification. They had often grown to the point where they did not want to return to the fields they had worked in after college, and they could even get into a new field with the core of autonomy that their education had given them.

  But what of the young women today who have never had a taste of higher education, who quit college to marry or marked time in their classrooms waiting for the “right man?” What will they be at forty? Housewives in every suburb and city are seeking more education today, as if a course, any course, will give them the identity they are groping toward. But the courses they take, and the courses they are offered, are seldom intended for real use in society. Even more than the education she evaded at eighteen in sexual phantasy, the education a woman can get at forty is permeated, contaminated, diluted by the feminine mystique.

  Courses in golf, bridge, rug-hooking, gourmet cooking, sewing are intended, I suppose, for real use, by women who stay in the housewife trap. The so-called intellectual courses offered in the usual adult education centers—art appreciation, ceramics, short-story writing, conversational French, Great Books, astronomy in the Space Age—are intended only as “self-enrichment.” The study, the effort, even the homework that imply a long-term commitment are not expected of the housewife.

  Actually, many women who take these courses desperately need serious education; but if they have never had a taste of it, they do not know how and where to look for it, nor do they even understand that so many adult education courses are unsatisfactory simply because they are not serious. The dimension of reality essential even to “self-enrichment” is barred, almost by definition, in a course specifically designed for “housewives.” This is true, even where the institution giving the course has the highest standards. Recently, Radcliffe announced an “Institute for Executives’ Wives” (to be followed presumably by an “Institute for Scientists’ Wives,” or an “Institute for Artists’ Wives,” or an “Institute for College Professors’ Wives”). The executive’s wife or the scientist’s wife, at thirty-five or forty, whose children are all at school is hardly going to be helped to the new identity she needs by learning to take a more detailed, vicarious share of her husband’s world. What she needs is training for creative work of her own.

  Among the women I interviewed, education was the key to the problem that has no name only when it was part of a new life plan, and meant for serious use in society—amateur or professional. They were able to find such education only in the regular colleges and universities. Despite the wishful thinking engendered by the feminine mystique in girls and in their educators, an education evaded at eighteen or twenty-one is insuperably harder to obtain at thirty-one or thirty-eight or forty-one, by a woman who has a husband and three or four children and a home. She faces, in the college or university, the prejudices created by the feminine mystique. No matter how brief her absence from the academic proving ground, she will have to demonstrate her seriousness of purpose over and over again to be readmitted. She must then compete with the teeming hordes of children she and others like her have overproduced in this era. It is not easy for a grown woman to sit through courses geared to teenagers, to be treated as a teenager again, to have to prove that she deserves to be taken as seriously as a teenager. A woman has to exercise great ingenuity, endure many rebuffs and disappointments, to find an education that fits her need, and also make it fit her other commitments as wife and mother.

  One woman I interviewed who had never gone to college, decided, after psychotherapy, to take two courses a year at a nearby university which, fortunately, had an evening school. At first, she had no idea where it was leading her, but after two years, she decided to major in history and prepare to teach it in high school. She maintained a good record, even though she was often impatient with the slow pace and the busywork. But, at least, studying with some purpose made her feel better than when she used to read mystery stories or magazines at the playground. Above all, it was leading to something real for the future. But at the rate of two courses a year (which then cost $420, and two evenings a week in class), it would have taken her ten years to get a B.A. The second year, money was scarce, and she could only take one course. She could not apply for a student loan unless she went full time, which she could not do until her youngest was in first grade. In spite of it all, she stuck it out that way for four years—noticing that more and more of the other housewives in her classes dropped out because of money, or because “the whole thing was going to take too long.”

  Then, with her youngest in first grade, she became a full-time student in the regular college, where the pace was even slower because the students were “less serious.” She couldn’t endure the thought of all the years ahead to get an M.A. (which she would need to teach high-school history in that state), so she switched to an education major. She certainly would not have continued this expensive, tortuous education if, by now, she had not had a clear life plan to use it, a plan that required it. Committed to elementary teaching, she was able to get a government loan for part of her full-time tuition (now exceeding $1,000 a year), and in another two years she will be finished.

  Even against such enormous obstacles, more and more women with virtually no help from society and with belated and begrudging encouragement from educators themselves, are going back to school to get the education they need. Their determination betrays women’s underestimated human strength and their urgent need to use it. But only the strongest, after nearly twenty years of the feminine mystique, can move on by themselves. For this is not just the private problem of each individual woman. There are implications of the feminine mystique that must be faced on a national scale.

  The problem that has no name—which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities—is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. Consider the high incidence of emotional breakdown of women in the “role crises” of their twenties and thirties; the alcoholism and suicides in their forties and fifties; the housewives’ monopolization of all doctors’ time. Consider the prevalence of teenage marriages, the growing rate of illegitimate pregnancies, and even more seriously, the pathology of mother-child symbiosis. Consider the alarming passivity of American teenagers. If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity, without a strong core of human values to pass on to their children, we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women and ending with the progressive dehumanization of their sons and daughters.

  These problems cannot be solved by medicine, or even by psychotherapy. We need a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity that will permit women to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfillment. A massive attempt must be made by educators and parents—and ministers, magazine editors, manipulators, guidance counselors—to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be “just a housewife,” stop it by insisting, with the same attention from childhood on that parents and educators give to boys, that girls develop the resources of self, goals that will permit them to find their own identity.

  It is, of course, no easier for an educator to say “no” to the feminine mystique than for an individual girl or woman. Even the most advanced of educators, seriously concerned with
the desperate need of housewives with leftover lives on their hands, hesitate to buck the tide of early marriage. They have been browbeaten by the oracles of popularized psychoanalysis and still tremble with guilt at the thought of interfering with a woman’s sexual fulfillment. The rearguard argument offered by the oracles who are, in some cases, right on college campuses themselves, is that since the primary road to identity for a woman is marriage and motherhood, serious educational interests or commitments which may cause conflicts in her role as wife and mother should be postponed until the childbearing years are over. Such a warning was made in 1962 by a psychiatric consultant to Yale University—which had been considering admitting women as undergraduates for the same serious education it gives men.

  Many young women—if not the majority—seem to be incapable of dealing with future long-range intellectual interests until they have proceeded through the more basic phases of their own healthy growth as women…. To be well done, the mother’s job in training children and shaping the life of her family should draw on all a woman’s resources, emotional and intellectual, and upon all her skills. The better her training, the better chance she will have to do the job well, provided that emotional roadblocks do not stand in her way: provided, that is, that she has established a good basis for the development of adult femininity, and that during the course of her higher education, she is not subjected to pressures which adversely affect that development.…To urge upon her conflicting goals, to stress that a career and a profession in the man’s world should be the first consideration in planning her life, can adversely affect the full development of her identity…. Of all the social freedoms won by her grandmothers, she prizes first the freedom to be a healthy, fulfilled woman, and she wants to be free of guilt and conflict about it…. This means that though jobs are often possible within the framework of marriage, “careers” rarely are…5