The Mistaken Choice
A mystique does not compel its own acceptance. For the feminine mystique to have “brainwashed” American women of nonsexual human purposes for more than fifteen years, it must have filled real needs in those who seized on it for others and those who accepted it for themselves. Those needs may not have been the same in all the women or in all the purveyors of the mystique. But there were many needs, at this particular time in America, that made us pushovers for the mystique; needs so compelling that we suspended critical thought, as one does in the face of an intuitive truth. The trouble is, when need is strong enough, intuition can also lie.
There was, just before the feminine mystique took hold in America, a war, which followed a depression and ended with the explosion of an atom bomb. After the loneliness of war and the unspeakableness of the bomb, against the frightening uncertainty, the cold immensity of the changing world, women as well as men sought the comforting reality of home and children. In the fox-holes, the GI’s had pinned up pictures of Betty Grable, but the songs they asked to hear were lullabies. And when they got out of the Army they were too old to go home to their mothers. The needs of sex and love are undeniably real in men and women, boys and girls, but why at this time did they seem to so many the only needs?
We were all vulnerable, homesick, lonely, frightened. A pent-up hunger for marriage, home, and children was felt simultaneously by several different generations; a hunger which, in the prosperity of postwar America, everyone could suddenly satisfy. The young GI, made older than his years by the war, could meet his lonely need for love and mother by re-creating his childhood home. Instead of dating many girls until college and profession were achieved, he could marry on the GI bill, and give his own babies the tender mother love he was no longer baby enough to seek for himself. Then there were the slightly older men: men of twenty-five whose marriages had been postponed by the war and who now felt they must make up for lost time; men in their thirties, kept first by depression and then by war from marrying, or if married, from enjoying the comforts of home.
For the girls, these lonely years added an extra urgency to their search for love. Those who married in the thirties saw their husbands off to war; those who grew up in the forties were afraid, with reason, that they might never have the love, the homes and children which few women would willingly miss. When the men came back, there was a headlong rush into marriage. The lonely years when husbands or husbands-to-be were away at war—or could be sent away at a bomb’s fall—made women particularly vulnerable to the feminine mystique. They were told that the cold dimension of loneliness which the war had added to their lives was the necessary price they had to pay for a career, for any interest outside the home. The mystique spelled out a choice—love, home, children, or other goals and purposes in life. Given such a choice, was it any wonder that so many American women chose love as their whole purpose?
The baby boom of the immediate postwar years took place in every country. But it was not permeated, in most other countries, with the mystique of feminine fulfillment. It did not in other countries lead to the even greater baby boom of the fifties, with the rise in teenage marriages and pregnancies, and the increase in family size. The number of American women with three or more children doubled in twenty years. And educated women, after the war, led all the others in the race to have more babies.1 (The generation before mine, the women born between 1910 and 1919, showed the change most sharply. During their twenties, their low pregnancy rate led to warnings that education was going to wipe out the human race; in their thirties, they suddenly showed a sharp increase in pregnancies, despite the lowered biological capacity that makes the pregnancy rate decline with age.)
More babies are always born after wars. But today the American population explosion comes in large part from teenage marriages. The number of children born to teenagers rose 165 per cent between 1940 and 1957, according to Metropolitan Life Insurance figures. The girls who would normally go to college but leave or forgo it to marry (eighteen and nineteen are the most frequent ages of marriage of American girls today; half of all American women are married by twenty) are products of the mystique. They give up education without a qualm, truly believing that they will find “fulfillment” as wives and mothers. I suppose a girl today, who knows from statistics or merely from observation that if she waits to marry until she finishes college, or trains for a profession, most of the men will be married to someone else, has as much reason to fear she may miss feminine fulfillment as the war gave the girls in the forties. But this does not explain why they drop out of college to support their husbands, while the boys continue with their education.
It has not happened in other countries. Even in countries where, during the war, many more men were killed and more women were forced forever to miss the fulfillment of marriage, women did not run home again in panic. And in the other countries today, girls are as hungry as boys for the education that is the road to the future.
War made women particularly vulnerable to the mystique, but the war, with all its frustrations, was not the only reason they went home again. Nor can it be explained by “the servant problem,” which is an excuse the educated woman often gives to herself. During the war, when the cooks and maids went to work in the war plants, the servant problem was even more severe than in recent years. But at that time, women of spirit often worked out unconventional domestic arrangements to keep their professional commitments. (I knew two young wartime mothers who pooled forces while their husbands were overseas. One, an actress, took both babies in the morning, while the other did graduate work; the second took over in the afternoon, when the other had a rehearsal or matinee. I also knew a woman who switched her baby’s night-and-day so he would sleep at a neighbor’s house during the hours she was at medical school.) And in the cities, then, the need for nurseries and day-care centers for the children of working mothers was seen, and met.
But in the years of postwar femininity, even women who could afford, and find, a full-time nurse or housekeeper chose to take care of house and children themselves. And in the cities, during the fifties, the nursery and day-care centers for the children of working mothers all but disappeared; the very suggestion of their need brought hysterical outcries from educated housewives as well as the purveyors of the mystique.2
When the war ended, of course, GI’s came back to take the jobs and fill the seats in colleges and universities that for a while had been occupied largely by girls. For a short time, competition was keen and the resurgence of the old anti-feminine prejudices in business and the professions made it difficult for a girl to keep or advance in a job. This undoubtedly sent many women scurrying for the cover of marriage and home. Subtle discrimination against women, to say nothing of the sex wage differential, is still an unwritten law today, and its effects are almost as devastating and as hard to fight as the flagrant opposition faced by the feminists. A woman researcher on Time magazine, for instance, cannot, no matter what her ability, aspire to be a writer; the unwritten law makes the men writers and editors, the women researchers. She doesn’t get mad; she likes her job, she likes her boss. She is not a crusader for women’s rights; it isn’t a case for the Newspaper Guild. But it is discouraging nevertheless. If she is never going to get anywhere, why keep on?
Women were often driven embittered from their chosen fields when, ready and able to handle a better job, they were passed over for a man. In some jobs a woman had to be content to do the work while the man got the credit. Or if she got the better job, she had to face the bitterness and hostility of the man. Because the race to get ahead, in the big organization, in every profession in America, is so terribly competitive for men, competition from women is somehow the last straw—and much easier to fight by simply evoking that unwritten law. During the war, women’s abilities, and the inevitable competition, were welcome; after the war they were confronted with that polite but inpenetrable curtain of hostility. It was easier for a woman to love and be loved, and have an
excuse not to compete with men.
Still, during the depression, able, spirited girls sacrificed, fought prejudice, and braved competition in order to pursue their careers, even though there were fewer places to compete for. Nor did many see any conflict between career and love. In the prosperous postwar years, there were plenty of jobs, plenty of places in all the professions; there was no real need to give up everything for love and marriage. The less-educated girls, after all, did not leave the factories and go back to being maids. The proportion of women in industry has steadily increased since the war—but not of women in careers or professions requiring training, effort, personal commitment.3 “I live through my husband and children,” a frank member of my own generation told me. “It’s easier that way. In this world now, it’s easier to be a woman, if you take advantage of it.”
In this sense, what happened to women is part of what happened to all of us in the years after the war. We found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the courage to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; men as well as women, scared liberals, disillusioned radicals, conservatives bewildered and frustrated by change—the whole nation stopped growing up. All of us went back into the warm brightness of home, the way it was when we were children and slept peacefully upstairs while our parents read, or played bridge in the living room, or rocked on the front porch in the summer evening in our home towns.
Women went home again just as men shrugged off the bomb, forgot the concentration camps, condoned corruption, and fell into helpless conformity; just as the thinkers avoided the complex larger problems of the postwar world. It was easier, safer, to think about love and sex than about communism, McCarthy, and the uncontrolled bomb. It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas, and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs. There was a kind of personal retreat, even on the part of the most far-sighted, the most spirited; we lowered our eyes from the horizon, and steadily contemplated our own navels.
We can see all this now, in retrospect. Then, it was easier to build the need for love and sex into the end-all purpose of life, avoiding personal commitment to truth in a catch-all commitment to “home” and “family.” For the social worker, the psychologist and the numerous “family” counselors, analytically oriented therapy for private patients on personal problems of sex, personality, and interpersonal relations was safer and more lucrative than probing too deeply for the common causes of man’s suffering. If you no longer wanted to think about the whole of mankind, at least you could “help” individuals without getting into trouble. Irwin Shaw, who once goaded the American conscience on the great issues of war and peace and racial prejudice now wrote about sex and adultery; Norman Mailer and the young beatnik writers confined their revolutionary spirit to sex and kicks and drugs and advertising themselves in four-letter words. It was easier and more fashionable for writers to think about psychology than politics, about private motives than public purposes. Painters retreated into an abstract expressionism that flaunted discipline and glorified the evasion of meaning. Dramatists reduced human purpose to bitter, pretentious nonsense: “the theater of the absurd.” Freudian thought gave this whole process of escape its dimension of endless, tantalizing, intellectual mystery: process within process, meaning hidden within meaning, until meaning itself disappeared and the hopeless, dull outside world hardly existed at all. As a drama critic said, in a rare note of revulsion at the stage world of Tennessee Williams, it was as if no reality remained for man except his sexual perversions, and the fact that he loved and hated his mother.
The Freudian mania in the American culture, apart from the practice of psychotherapy itself, also filled a real need in the forties and fifties: the need for an ideology, a national purpose, an application of the mind to the problems of people. Analysts themselves have recently suggested that the lack of an ideology or national purpose may be partially responsible for the personal emptiness which sends many men and women into psychotherapy; they are actually looking for an identity which therapy alone can never give. The religious revival in America coincided with the rush to psychoanalysis, and perhaps came about for the same reason—behind the search for identity, or for shelter, a vacuum of larger purpose. It is significant that many ministers now spend much of their time in giving psychotherapy—pastoral counseling—to members of their congregations. Do they thereby also evade the larger questions, the real search?
When I was interviewing on college campuses in the late fifties, chaplains and sociologists alike testified to the younger generation’s “privatism.” A major reason for the early marriage movement, they felt, was that the young saw no other true value in contemporary society. It’s easy for the professional social critic to blame the younger generation for cynical preoccupation with private pleasure and material security—or for the empty negativism of beatnikery. But if their parents, teachers, preachers, have abdicated purposes larger than personal emotional adjustment, material success, security, what larger purpose can the young learn?
The five babies, the movement to suburbia, do-it-yourself and even beatnikery filled homely needs; they also took the place of those larger needs and purposes with which the most spirited in this nation were once concerned. “I’m bored with politics…there’s nothing you can do about it anyhow.” When a dollar was too cheap, and too expensive, to live a life for, and your whole society seemed concerned with little else, the family and its loves and problems—this, at least, was good and true. And the literal swallowing of Freud gave the illusion that it was more important than it really was for the whole of suffering society, as the literal parroting of Freudian phrases deluded suffering individuals into believing that they were cured, when underneath they had not yet even faced their real troubles.
Under the Freudian microscope, however, a very different concept of family began to emerge. Oedipus conflict and sibling rivalry became household words. Frustration was as great a peril to childhood as scarlet fever. And singled out for special attention was the “mother.” It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for almost everything. In every case history of troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American, could be found a mother. A frustrated, repressed, disturbed, martyred, never satisfied, unhappy woman. A demanding, nagging, shrewish wife. A rejecting, overprotecting, dominating mother. World War II revealed that millions of American men were psychologically incapable of facing the shock of war, of facing life away from their “moms.” Clearly something was “wrong” with American women.
By unfortunate coincidence, this attack against mothers came about at the same time that American women were beginning to use the rights of their emancipation, to go in increasing numbers to college and professional schools, to rise in industry and the professions in inevitable competition with men. Women were just beginning to play a part in American society that depended not on their sex, but on their individual abilities. It was apparent to the naked eye, obvious to the returning GI, that these American women were indeed more independent, strong-minded, assertive of will and opinion, less passive and feminine than, for instance, the German and Japanese girls who, the GI’s boasted, “even washed our backs for us.” It was less apparent, however, that these girls were different from their mothers. Perhaps that is why, by some strange distortion of logic, all the neuroses of children past and present were blamed on the independence and individuality of this new generation of American girls—independence and individuality which the housewife-mothers of the previous generation had never had.
The evidence seemed inescapable: the figures on the psychiatric discharges in the war and the mothers in their case histories; the early Kinsey figures on the incapacity of American women to enjoy sexual orgasm, especially educated women; the fact that so many women were frustrated, and took it out on their husb
ands and children. More and more men in America did feel inadequate, impotent. Many of those first generations of career women did miss love and children, resented and were resented by the men they competed with. More and more American men, women, children were going to mental hospitals, clinics, psychiatrists. All this was laid at the doorstep of the frustrated American mother, “masculinized” by her education, prevented by her insistence on equality and independence from finding sexual fulfillment as a woman.
It all fitted so neatly with the Freudian rationale that no one stopped to investigate what these pre-war mothers were really like. They were indeed frustrated. But the mothers of the maladjusted soldiers, the insecure and impotent postwar males, were not independent educated career women, but self-sacrificing, dependent, martyred-housewife “moms.”
In 1940, less than a fourth of American women worked outside the home; those who did were for the most part unmarried. A minuscule 2.5 per cent of mothers were “career women.” The mothers of the GI’s who were 18 to 30 in 1940 were born in the nineteenth century, or the early 1900’s, and were grown up before American women won the right to vote, or enjoyed the independence, the sexual freedom, the educational or the career opportunities of the twenties. By and large, these “moms” were neither feminists, nor products of feminism, but American women leading the traditional feminine life of housewife and mother. Was it really education, career dreams, independence, which made the “moms” frustrated, and take it out on their children? Even a book that helped build the new mystique—Edward Strecker’s Their Mothers’ Sons—confirms the fact that the “moms” were neither career women, nor feminists, nor used their education, if they had it; they lived for their children, they had no interests beyond home, children, family, or their own beauty. In fact, they fit the very image of the feminine mystique.
The Feminine Mystique Page 24