The Feminine Mystique

by Friedan, Betty

  29. Ernest W. Burgess and Leonard S. Cottrell, Jr., Predicting Success or Failure in Marriage, New York, 1939, p. 271.

  30. A. C. Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, p. 403.

  31. Sylvan Keiser, “Body Ego During Orgasm,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1952, Vol. XXI, pp. 153—166:

  Individuals of this group are characterized by failure to develop adequate egos failure to develop adequate egos. Their anxious devotion to, and lavish care of, their bodies belies the inner feelings of hollowness and inadequacy…. These patients have little sense of their own identity and are always ready to take on the personality of someone else. They have few personal convictions, and yield readily to the opinions of others…. It is chiefly among such patients that coitus can be enjoyed only up to the point of orgasm…. They dared not allow themselves uninhibited progression to orgasm with its concomitant loss of control, loss of awareness of the body, or death…. In instances of uncertainty about the structure and boundaries of the body image, one might say that the skin does not serve as an envelope which sharply defines the transition from the self to the environment; the one gradually merges into the other; there is no assurance of being a distinct entity endowed with the strength to give of itself without endangering one’s own integrity.

  32. Lawrence Kubie, “Psychiatric Implications of the Kinsey Report,” in Sexual Behavior in American Society, pp. 270 ff:

  This simple biologic aim is overlaid by many subtle goals of which the individual himself is usually unaware. Some of these are attainable; some are not. Where the majority are attainable, then the end result of sexual activity is an afterglow of peaceful completion and satisfaction. Where, however, the unconscious goals are unattainable, then whether orgasm has occurred or not, there remains a post-coital state of unsated need, and sometimes of fear, rage or depression.

  33. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, pp. 239—283, 367—380. See also Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself; and David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd.

  34. See Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein (Women’s Two Roles), who point out that the number of American women now working outside the home seems greater than it is because the base from which the comparison is usually made was unusually small: a century ago the proportion of American women working outside the home was far smaller than in the European countries. In other words, the woman problem in America was probably unusually severe because the displacement of American women from essential work and identity in society was far more drastic—primarily because of the extremely rapid growth and industrialization of the American economy. The women who had grown with the men in the frontier days were banished almost overnight to anomie—which is a very expressive sociological name for that sense of non-existence or non-identity suffered by one who has no real place in society—when the important work left the home, where they stayed. In contrast, in France where industrialization was slower, and farms and small family-size shops are still fairly important in the economy, women a century ago still worked in large numbers—in field and shop—and today the majority of French women are not full-time housewives in the American sense of the mystique, for an enormous number still work in the fields, in addition to that one out of three who, as in America, work in industry, sales, offices, and professions. The growth of women in France has much more closely paralleled the growth of the society, since the proportion of French women in the professions has doubled in fifty years. It is interesting to note that the feminine mystique does not prevail in France, to the extent that it does here; there is a legitimate image in France of a feminine career woman and feminine intellectual, and French men seem responsive to women sexually, without equating femininity either with glorified emptiness or that man-eating castrative mom. Nor has the family been weakened—in actuality or mystique—by women’s work in industry and profession. Myrdal and Klein show that the French career women continue to have children—but not the great number the new educated American housewives produce.

  35. Sidney Ditzion, Marriage, Morals and Sex in America, A History of Ideas, New York, 1953, p. 277.

  36. William James, Psychology, New York, 1892, p. 458.

  Chapter 14. A NEW LIFE PLAN FOR WOMEN

  1. See “Mother’s Choice: Manager or Martyr,” and “For a Mother’s Hour,” New York Times Magazine, January 14, 1962, and March 18, 1962.

  2. The sense that work has to be “real,” and not just “therapy” or busywork, to provide a basis for identity becomes increasingly explicit in the theories of the self, even when there is no specific reference to women. Thus, in defining the beginnings of “identity” in the child, Erikson says in Childhood and Society (p. 208):

  The growing child must, at every step, derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its space-time and life plan.

  In this children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but their ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment—i.e., of achievement that has meaning in the culture.

  3. 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, 6, April, 1960.

  4. Polly Weaver, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” Mademoiselle, September, 1956.

  5. Edna G. Rostow, “The Best of Both Worlds,” Yale Review, March, 1962.

  6. Ida Fisher Davidoff and May Elish Markewich, “The Postparental Phase in the Life Cycle of Fifty College-Educated Women,” unpublished doctoral study, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1961. These fifty educated women had been full-time housewives and mothers throughout the years their children were in school. With the last child’s departure, the women suffering severe distress because they had no deep interest beyond the home included a few whose actual ability and achievement were high; these women had been leaders in community work, but they felt like “phonies,” “frauds,” earning respect for “work a ten-year-old could do.” The authors” own orientation in the functional-adjustment school makes them deplore the fact that education gave these women “unrealistic” goals (a surprising number, now in their fifties and sixties, still wished they had been doctors). However, those women who had pursued interests—which in every case had begun in college—and were working now in jobs or politics or art, did not feel like “phonies,” or even suffer the expected distress at menopause. Despite the distress of those who lacked such interests, none of them, after the child-bearing years were over, wanted to go back to school; there were simply too few years left to justify the effort. So they continued “woman’s role” by acting as mothers to their own aged parents or by finding pets, plants, or simply “people as my hobby” to take the place of their children.

  The interpretation of the two family-life educators—who themselves became professional marriage counselors in middle age—is interesting:

  For those women in our group who had high aspirations or high intellectual endowment or both, the discrepancy between some of the values stressed in our success-and-achievement oriented society and the actual opportunities open to the older, untrained women was especially disturbing…. The door open to the woman with a skill was closed to the one without training, even if she was tempted to try to find a place for herself among the gainfully employed. The reality hazards of the work situation seemed to be recognized by most, however. They felt neither prepared for the kind of job which might appeal to them, nor willing to take the time and expend the energy which would be required for training, in view of the limited number of active years ahead…. The lack of pressure resulting from reduced responsibility had to be handled…. As the primary task of motherhood was finished, the satisfactions of volunteer work, formerly a secondary outlet, seemed to be di
minishing…. The cultural activities of the suburbs were limited. “Even in the city, adult education’ seemed to be “busy work,” leading nowhere….

  Thus, some women expressed certain regrets: “It is too late to develop a new skill leading to a career.” “If I had pursued a single line, it would have utilized my potential to the full.” But the authors note with approval that “the vast majority have somehow adjusted themselves to their place in society.”

  Because our culture demands of women certain renunciations of activity and limits her scope of participation in the stream of life, at this point being a woman would seem to be an advantage rather than a handicap. All her life, as a female, she had been encouraged to be sensitive to the feelings and needs of others. Her life, at strategic points, had required denials of self. She had had ample opportunities for “dress rehearsals” for this latest renunciation” of a long series of renunciations begun early in life. Her whole life as a woman had been giving her a skill which she was now free to use to the full without further preparation…

  7. Nevitt Sanford, “Personality Development During the College Years,” Journal of Social Issues, 1956, Vol. 12, No. 4, p. 36.

  8. The public flurry in the spring of 1962 over the sexual virginity of Vassar girls is a case in point. The real question, for the educator, would seem to me to be whether these girls were getting from their education the serious lifetime goals only education can give them. If they are, they can be trusted to be responsible for their sexual behavior. President Blanding indeed defied the mystique to say boldly that if girls are not in college for education, they should not be there at all. That her statement caused such an uproar is evidence of the extent of sex-directed education.

  9. The impossibility of part-time study of medicine, science, and law, and of part-time graduate work in the top universities has kept many women of high ability from attempting it. But in 1962, the Harvard Graduate School of Education let down this barrier to encourage more able housewives to become teachers. A plan was also announced in New York to permit women doctors to do their psychiatric residencies and postgraduate work on a part-time basis, taking into account their maternal responsibilities.

  10. Virginia L. Senders, “The Minnesota Plan for Women’s Continuing Education,” in “Unfinished Business—Continuing Education for Women,” The Educational Record, American Council on Education, October, 1961, pp. 10 ff.

  11. Mary Bunting, “The Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study,” Ibid., pp. 19 ff. Radcliffe’s president reflects the feminine mystique when she deplores “the use the first college graduates made of their advanced educations. Too often and understandably, they became crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate, but also, at times, loud. A stereotype of the educated women grew up in the popular mind and concurrently, a prejudice against both the stereotype and the education.” Similarly she states:

  That we have not made any respectable attempt to meet the special educational needs of women in the past is the clearest possible evidence of the fact that our educational objectives have been geared exclusively to the vocational patterns of men. In changing that emphasis, however, our goal should not be to equip and encourage women to compete with men…. Women, because they are not generally the principal breadwinners, can be perhaps most useful as the trail blazers, working along the bypaths, doing the unusual job that men cannot afford to gamble on. There is always room on the fringes even when competition in the intellectual market places is keen.

  That women use their education today primarily “on the fringes” is a result of the feminine mystique, and of the prejudices against women it masks; it is doubtful whether these remaining barriers will ever be overcome if even educators are going to discourage able women from becoming “crusaders and reformers, passionate, fearless, articulate,”—and loud enough to be heard.

  12. Time, November, 1961. See also “Housewives at the $2 Window,” New York Times Magazine, April 1, 1962, which describes how babysitting services and “clinics” for suburban housewives are now being offered at the race tracks.

  13. See remarks of State Assemblywoman Dorothy Bell Lawrence, Republican, of Manhattan, reported in the New York Times, May 8, 1962. The first woman to be elected a Republican district leader in New York City, she explained: “I was doing all the work, so I told the county chairman that I wanted to be chairman. He told me it was against the rules for a woman to hold the post, but then he changed the rules.” In the Democratic “reform” movement in New York, women are also beginning to assume leadership posts commensurate with their work, and the old segregated “ladies” auxiliaries” and “women’s committees” are beginning to go.

  14. Among more than a few women I interviewed who had, as the mystique advises, completely renounced their own ambitions to become wives and mothers, I noticed a repeated history of miscarriages. In several cases, only after the woman finally resumed the work she had given up, or went back to graduate school, was she able to carry to term the long-desired second or third child.

  15. American women’s life expectancy—75 years—is the longest of women anywhere in the world. But as Myrdal and Klein point out in Women’s Two Roles, there is increasing recognition that, in human beings, chronological age differs from biological age: “at the chronological age of 70, the divergencies in biological age may be as wide as between the chronological ages of 50 and 90.” The new studies of aging in humans indicate that those who have the most education and who live the most complex and active lives, with deep interests and readiness for new experience and learning, do not get “old” in the sense that others do. A close study of 300 biographies (See Charlotte Buhler, “The Curve of Life as Studied in Biographies,” Journal of Applied Psychology, XIX, August, 1935, pp. 405 ff.) reveals that in the latter half of life, the person’s productivity becomes independent of his biological equipment, and, in fact, is often at a higher level than his biological efficiency—that is, if the person has emerged from biological living. Where “spiritual factors” dominated activity, the highest point of productivity came in the latter part of life; where “physical facts” were decisive in the life of an individual, the high point was reached earlier and the psychological curve was then more closely comparable to the biological. The study of educated women cited above revealed much less suffering at menopause than is considered “normal” in America today. Most of these women whose horizons had not been confined to physical housekeeping and their biological role, did not, in their fifties and sixties feel “old.” Many reported in surprise that they suffered much less discomfort at menopause than their mothers” experience had led them to expect. Therese Benedek suggests (in “Climacterium: A Developmental Phase,” Psychoanalytical Quarterly, XIX, 1950, p. 1) that the lessened discomfort, and burst of creative energy many women now experience at menopause, is at least in part due to the “emancipation” of women. Kinsey’s figures seem to indicate that women who have by education been emancipated from purely biological living, experience the full peak of sexual fulfillment much later in life than had been expected, and in fact, continue to experience it through the forties and past menopause. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is Colette—that truly human, emancipated French woman who lived and loved and wrote with so little deference to her chronological age that she said on her eightieth birthday: “If only one were 58, because at that time one is still desired and full of hope for the future.”

  THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE

  Betty Friedan

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  “[T]he image by which modern American women live also leave[s] something out…. This image—created by the women’s magazines, by advertisements, television, movies, novels, columns and books, by experts on marriage and the family, child psychology, sexual adjustment and by the popularizers of sociology and psychoanalysis—shapes women’s lives today and mirrors their dreams.” Betty Friedan first published these words in 1963 when the media’s picture of a
woman as wife and mother was certainly leaving something out. What has changed from the image of thirty years ago and what has not? What is today’s image leaving out?

  “The feminine mystique says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity…. But however special and different, [this feminity] is in no way inferior to the nature of man; it may even in certain respects be superior.” Does the idea that women’s differences give them a kind of superiority—or at least a certain advantage—have any currency today? In what ways do you see it expressed? Do you think it holds any truth?

  Betty Friedan writes: “I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and also loved, and had children.” Discuss how the tension between work and family operates for women today. Are the expectations of men and women different in this regard? Have expectations changed? Do the scars of the feminine mystique play a role in this issue today?

  Friedan argues that women were choosing marriage in order to avoid their fears about establishing their own identity and handling the fear and uncertainty that come with being alone. Do you agree with her assessment? Do you agree with the causes she cites: Margaret Mead, Freud and sex-directed education, the aftermath of World War II? Do women today marry for the same reasons?

  Are immaturity and dependency words that are still associated with femininity? What are the qualities that the word “woman” connotes today? Discuss the possible origins of these connotations.