The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  5. See “Papa’s Taking Over the PTA Mama Started,” New York Herald Tribune, February 10, 1962. At the 1962 national convention of Parent-Teacher Associations, it was revealed that 32 per cent of the 46,457 PTA presidents are now men. In certain states the percentage of male PTA heads is even higher, including New York (33 per cent), Connecticut (45 per cent) and Delaware (80 per cent).

  6. Nanette E. Scofield,’ some Changing Roles of Women in Suburbia: A Social Anthropological Case Study,” transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 22, No. 6, April, 1960.

  7. Mervin B. Freedman,’ studies of College Alumni,” in The American College, pp. 872 ff.

  8. Murray T. Pringle, “Women Are Wretched Housekeepers,” Science Digest, June, 1960.

  9. See Time, April 20, 1959.

  10. Farnham and Lundberg, Modern Women: The Lost Sex, p. 369.

  11. Edith M. Stern, “Women Are Household Slaves,” American Mercury, January, 1949.

  12. Russell Lynes, “The New Servant Class,” in A Surfeit of Honey, New York, 1957, pp. 49—64.

  Chapter 11. THE SEX-SEEKERS

  1. Several social historians have commented on America’s sexual preoccupation from the male point of view. “America has come to stress sex as much as any civilization since the Roman,” says Max Lerner (America as A Civilization, p. 678). David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, 1950, p. 172 ff.) calls sex “the Last Frontier.”

  More than before, as job-mindedness declines, sex permeates the daytime as well as the playtime consciousness. It is viewed as a consumption good not only by the old leisure classes but by the modern leisure masses….

  One reason for the change is that women are no longer objects for the acquisitive consumer but are peer-groupers themselves…. Today, millions of women, freed by technology from many household tasks, given by technology many aids to romance, have become pioneers with men on the frontiers of sex. As they become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows….

  It is mainly the clinicians who have noted that the men are often less eager now than their wives as sexual “consumers.” The late Dr. Abraham Stone, whom I interviewed shortly before his death, said that the wives complain more and more of sexually “inadequate” husbands. Dr. Karl Menninger reports that for every wife who complains of her husband’s excessive sexuality, a dozen wives complain that their husbands are apathetic or impotent. These “problems” are cited in the mass media as additional evidence that American women are losing their “femininity”—and thus provide new ammunition for the mystique. See John Kord Lagemann, “The Male Sex,” Redbook, December, 1956.

  2. Albert Ellis, The Folklore of Sex, New York, 1961, p. 123.

  3. See the amusing parody, “The Pious Pornographers,” by Ray Russell, in The Permanent Playboy, New York, 1959.

  4. A. C. Spectorsky, The Exurbanites, New York, 1955, p. 223.

  5. Nathan Ackerman, The Psychodynamics of Family Life, New York, 1958, pp. 112—127.

  6. Evan Hunter, Strangers When We Meet, New York, 1958, pp. 231—235.

  7. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, pp. 353 ff., p. 426.

  8. Doris Menzer-Benaron M.D., et al., “Patterns of Emotional Recovery from Hysterectomy,” Psychosomatic Medicine, XIX, No. 5, September, 1957, pp. 378—388.

  9. The fact that 75 per cent to 85 per cent of young mothers in America today feel negative emotions—resentment, grief, disappointment, outright rejection—when they become pregnant for the first time has been established in many studies. In fact, the perpetrators of the feminine mystique report findings to reassure young mothers that they are only “normal” in feeling this strange rejection of pregnancy—and that the only real problem is their “guilt” over feeling it. Thus Redbook magazine, in “How Women Really Feel about Pregnancy” (November, 1958), reports that the Harvard School of Public Health found 80 to 85 per cent of “normal women reject the pregnancy when they become pregnant” Long Island College Clinic found that less than a fourth of women are “happy” about their pregnancy; a New Haven study finds only 17 of 100 women “pleased” about having a baby. Comments the voice of editorial authority:

  The real danger that arises when a pregnancy is unwelcome and filled with troubled feelings is that a woman may become guilty and panic-stricken because she believes her reactions are unnatural or abnormal. Both marital and mother-child relations can be damaged as a result…. Sometimes a mental-health specialist is needed to allay guilt feelings…. Nor is there any time when a normal woman does not have feelings of depression and doubt when she learns that she is pregnant.

  Such articles never mention the various studies which indicate that women in other countries, both more and less advanced than the United States, and even American “career” women, are less likely to experience this emotional rejection of pregnancy. Depression at pregnancy may be “normal” for the housewife-mother in the era of the feminine mystique, but it is not normal to motherhood. As Ruth Benedict said, it is not biological necessity, but our culture which creates the discomforts, physical and psychological, of the female cycle. See her Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning.

  10. See William J. Goode, After Divorce, Glencoe, Ill., 1956.

  11. A. C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Philadelphia and London, 1948, p. 259, pp. 585—588.

  12. The male contempt for the American woman, as she has molded herself according to the feminine mystique, is depressingly explicit in the July, 1962 issue of Esquire, “The American Woman, A New Point of View.” See especially “The Word to Women—No’” by Robert Alan Aurthur, p. 32. The sex-lessness of the American female sex-seekers is eulogized by Malcolm Muggeridge (“Bedding Down in the Colonies,” p. 84): “How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive. With too much sex to be sensual, and too ravishing to ravish, age cannot wither them nor custom stale their infinite monotony.”

  13. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, p. 631.

  14. See Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America, New York, 1960, preface to second edition, pp. xxii ff. Also Albert Ellis, op. cit., pp. 186—190. Also Seward Hiltner,’ stability and Change in American Sexual Patterns,” in Sexual Behavior in American Society, Jerome Himelhoch and Sylvia Fleis Fava, eds., New York, 1955, p. 321.

  15. Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, New York, 1948, p. 10.

  16. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pp. 610 ff. See also Donald Webster Cory, op. cit., pp. 97 ff.

  17. Birth out of wedlock increased 194 per cent from 1956 to 1962; venereal disease among young people increased 132 per cent. (Time, March 16, 1962).

  18. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pp. 348 ff., 427—433.

  19. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, pp. 293, 378, 382.

  20. Clara Thompson, “Changing Concepts of Homosexuality in Psychoanalysis” in A Study of Interpersonal Relations, New Contributions to Psychiatry, Patrick Mullahy, ed., New York, 1949, pp. 218 ff.

  21. Erich Fromm, “Sex and Character: the Kinsey Report Viewed from the Standpoint of Psychoanalysis,” in Sexual Behavior in American Society, p. 307.

  22. Carl Binger, “The Pressures on College Girls Today,” Atlantic Monthly, February, 1961.

  23. Sallie Bingham, “Winter Term,” Mademoiselle, July, 1958.

  Chapter 12. PROGRESSIVE DEHUMANIZATION: THE COMFORTABLE CONCENTRATION CAMP

  1. Marjorie K. McCorquodale, “What They Will Die for in Houston,” Harper’s, October, 1961.

  2. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; also Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York and Toronto, 1941, pp. 185—206. Also Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, p. 239.

  3. David Riesman, introduction to Edgar Friedenberg’s The Vanishing Adolescent, Boston, 1959.

  4. Harold Taylor, �
��Freedom and Authority on the Campus,” in The American College, pp. 780 ff.

  5. David Riesman, introduction to Edgar Friedenberg’s The Vanishing Adolescent.

  6. See Eugene Kinkead, In Every War but One, New York, 1959. There has been an attempt in recent years to discredit or soft-pedal these findings. But a taped record of a talk given before the American Psychiatric Association in 1958 by Dr. William Mayer, who had been on one of the Army teams of psychiatrists and intelligence officers who interviewed the returning prisoners in 1953 and analyzed the data, caused many pediatricians and child specialists to ask, in the words of Dr. Spock: “Are unusually permissive, indulgent parents more numerous today—and are they weakening the character of our children” (Benjamin Spock, “Are We Bringing Up Our Children Too “Soft” for the Stern Realities They Must Face?” Ladies” Home Journal, September, 1960.) However unpleasantly injurious to American pride, there must be some explanation for the collapse of the American GI prisoners in Korea, as it differed not only from the behavior of American soldiers in previous wars, but from the behavior of soldiers of other nations in Korea. No American soldier managed to escape from the enemy prison camps, as they had in every other war. The shocking 38 per cent death rate was not explainable, even according to military authorities, on the basis of the climate, food, or inadequate medical facilities in the camps, nor was it caused by brutality or torture. “Give-up-itis” is how one doctor described the disease the Americans died from; they simply spent the days curled up under blankets, cutting down their diet to water alone, until they were dead, usually within three weeks. This seemed to be an American phenomenon. Turkish prisoners, who were also part of the UN force in Korea, lost no men by disease or starvation; they stuck together, obeyed their officers, adhered to health regulations, cooperated in the care of their sick, and refused to inform on one another.

  7. Edgar Friedenberg, The Vanishing Adolescent, pp. 212 ff.

  8. Andras Angyal, M.D., “Evasion of Growth,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 110, No. 5, November, 1953, pp. 358—361. See also Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 138—206.

  9. See Richard E. Gordon and Katherine K. Gordon, “Social Factors in the Prediction and Treatment of Emotional Disorders of Pregnancy,” American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1959, 77:5, pp. 1074-1083; also Richard E. Gordon and Katherine K. Gordon, “Psychiatric Problems of a Rapidly Growing Suburb,” American Medical Association Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 1958, Vol. 79; “Psychosomatic Problems of a Rapidly Growing Suburb,” Journal of the American Medical Association, 1959, 170:15; and “Social Psychiatry of a Mobile Suburb,” International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 1960, 6:1, 2, pp. 89—99. Some of these findings were popularized in the composite case histories of The Split Level Trap, written by the Gordons in collaboration with Max Gunther (New York, 1960).

  10. Richard E. Gordon,’ sociodynamics and Psychotherapy,” A.M.A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, April, 1959, Vol. 81, pp. 486—503.

  11. Adelaide M. Johnson and S. A. Szurels, “The Genesis of Antisocial Acting Out in Children and Adults,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1952, 21:323—343.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Beata Rank, “Adaptation of the Psychoanalytical Technique for the Treatment of Young Children with Atypical Development,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XIX, 1, January, 1949.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Beata Rank, Marian C. Putnam, and Gregory Rochlin, M.D., “The Significance of the “Emotional Climate” in Early Feeding Difficulties,” Psychosomatic Medicine, X, 5, October, 1948.

  17. Richard E. Gordon and Katherine K. Gordon, “Social Psychiatry of a Mobile Suburb,” op. cit., pp. 89—100.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Oscar Sternbach,’ sex Without Love and Marriage Without Responsibility,” an address presented at the 38th Annual Conference of The Child Study Association of America, March 12, 1962, New York City (mimeo ms.).

  20. Bruno Bettelheim, The Informed Heart—Autonomy in a Mass Age, Glencoe, Ill., 1960.

  21. Ibid., pp. 162—169.

  22. Ibid., p. 231.

  23. Ibid., pp. 233 ff.

  24. Ibid., p. 265.

  Chapter 13. THE FORFEITED SELF

  1. Rollo May, “The Origins and Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology,” in Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, Rollo May, Ernest Angel and Henri F. Ellenberger, eds., New York, 1958, pp. 30 ff. (See also Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, pp. 269 ff.; A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, New York, 1954; David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.)

  2. Rollo May, “Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy,” in Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, p. 87.

  3. Ibid., p. 52.

  4. Ibid., p. 53.

  5. Ibid., pp. 59 ff.

  6. See Kurt Goldstein, The Organism, A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived From Pathological Data on Man, New York and Cincinnati, 1939; also Abstract and Concrete Behavior, Evanston, Ill., 1950; Case of Idiot Savant (with Martin Scheerer), Evanston, 1945; Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology, Cambridge, 1947; After-Effects of Brain Injuries in War, New York, 1942.

  7. Eugene Minkowski, “Findings in a Case of Schizophrenic Depression,” in Existence, A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology, pp. 132 ff.

  8. O. Hobart Mowrer, “Time as a Determinant in Integrative Learning,” in Learning Theory and Personality Dynamics, New York, 1950.

  9. Eugene Minkowski, op. cit., pp. 133—138:

  We think and act and desire beyond that death which, even so, we could not escape. The very existence of such phenomena as the desire to do something for future generations clearly indicates our attitude in this regard. In our patient, it was this propulsion toward the future which seemed to be totally lacking…. In this personal impetus, there is an element of expansion; we go beyond the limits of our own ego and leave a personal imprint on the world about us, creating works which sever themselves from us to live their own lives. This accompanies a specific, positive feeling which we call contentment—that pleasure which accompanies every finished action or firm decision. As a feeling, it is unique As a feeling, it is unique. Our entire individual evolution consists in trying to surpass that which has already been done. When our mental life dims, the future closes in front of us unique….

  10. Rollo May, “Contributions of Existential Psychotherapy,” pp. 31 ff. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, human individuality and dignity are “given or assigned to us as a task which we ourselves must solve” in Tillich’s philosophy, if you do not have the “courage to be,” you lose your own being; in Sartre’s, you are your choices.

  11. A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, p. 83.

  12. A. H. Maslow,’ some Basic Propositions of Holistic-Dynamic Psychology,” an unpublished paper, Brandeis University.

  13. Ibid.

  14. A. H. Maslow, “Dominance, Personality and Social Behavior in Women,” Journal of Social Psychology, 1939, Vol. 10, pp. 3—39; and “Self Esteem (Dominance-Feeling) and Sexuality in Women,” Journal of Social Psychology, 1942, Vol. 16, pp. 259—294.

  15. A. H. Maslow, “Dominance, Personality and Social Behavior in Women,” op. cit., pp. 3—11.

  16. Ibid., pp. 13 ff.

  17. Ibid., p. 180.

  18. A. H. Maslow,’ self-Esteem (Dominance-Feeling) and Sexuality in Women, “p. 288. Maslow points out, however, that women with “ego insecurity” pretended a “self-esteem—they did not actually have. Such women had to “dominate,” in the ordinary sense, in their sexual relations, to compensate for their “ego insecurity” thus, they were either castrative or masochistic. As I have pointed out, such women must have been very common in a society which gives women little chance for true self-esteem; this was undoubtedly the basis of the man-eating myth, and of Freud’s equation of femininity with castrative penis envy and/or masochistic passivity.

  19. A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, pp. 200 ff.

 
20. Ibid., pp. 211 ff.

  21. Ibid., p. 214.

  22. Ibid., pp. 242 ff.

  23. Ibid., pp. 257 ff. Maslow found that his self-actualizing people “have in unusual measure the rare ability to be pleased rather than threatened by the partner’s triumphs…. A most impressive example of this respect is the ungrudging pride of such a man in his wife’s achievements even where they outshine his.” (Ibid., p. 252).

  24. Ibid., p. 245.

  25. Ibid., p. 255.

  26. A. C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, pp. 356 ff.; Table 97, p. 397; Table 104, p. 403.

  Decade of Birth vs. Percentage of Marital Coitus Leading to Orgasm

  27. Ibid., p. 355.

  28. See Judson T. Landis, “The Women Kinsey Studied, “George Simpson, “Nonsense about Women,” and A. H. Maslow and James M. Sakoda, “Volunteer Error in the Kinsey Study,” in Sexual Behavior in American Society.