For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The rules of possession are clear: first of all, concentrate on “owning yourself” and “owning your feelings,” because everyone else will be busy doing the same. No more will love be sung to the tune of romantic bondage—“we belong to each other,” “I gave my heart to him,” “I’m going to make her mine,” and so forth. No, in the new game you never give yourself away completely:

  … an adult, when he loves, does not risk his whole identity. That he already has, and will have however the other responds. If he loses his lover, he will still have himself. But if you look to someone else to establish your identity for you in some way, losing that person can make you really feel destroyed.68

  To this self-possessed adult in a universe of standardized “selves,” not even death makes too much of an impact. One of the psychiatrist-authors of How to Be Your Own Best Friend recalls:

  I once was seeing a man who was grieving deeply. The person he had been closest to had died, and he felt utterly desolate. I sat with him and could feel the depths of his sorrow. Finally, I said to him, “You look as if you had lost your best friend.” He said, “Well, I have.” And I said, “Don’t you know who your best friend is?” He looked at me, surprised. He thought a moment, and tears came into his eyes. Then he said, “I guess it’s true—you are your own best friend.”69

  In the world of standardized, interchangeable “players,” all relationships are governed by the marketplace principle of equivalent exchange. If the two of you can establish an equitable stroke exchange: beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped: move on to another player. The old hierarchies of protection and dependency no longer exist, there are only free contracts, freely terminated. The marketplace, which had long ago expanded to include the relations of production, has now expanded to include all relationships.

  The new psychology recognized at once that women were entering the expanded emotional-economic marketplace with a special handicap: they had been prepared since childhood for a life of unqualified giving, in a framework of stable, protective relationships. This handicap called for a special sort of mass therapy—something which could provide women with the “survival skills” they would now need in a world dominated by the singles culture. Assertiveness Training, as the new therapy was labeled, called for nothing short of a complete psychological make-over. According to the introduction to one manual, women were recognizing that “there was a kind of disability in our femininity”70 and that if they were not going to go under in the fierce personal and occupational race, they would have to change—fast.

  With very little hesitation, the assertiveness-training books fastened on male behavior as the model. They observed that most men don’t have assertiveness problems; their socialization has given them the proper degree of self-centeredness. But “Society has never impressed on women as it has on men the absolute necessity of putting yourself first.”71 The assertiveness training books enviously praise the emotional upbringing of boys in stark contrast to the experiences of girls:

  Had you been born a boy, you’d probably have been welcomed warmly, with expectations of either following in Father’s footsteps (if they’re big ones) or of surpassing him. As a girl, however, your greeting may be more subdued—particularly if you already have an older sister. “Oh, well, maybe we’ll try again,” Dad might say. “She is a pretty little thing.”… If you have in fact put yourself first, you’ve learned to feel guilty afterward, in contrast to boys, who can assert themselves, say what they want—and even fight to get it!72

  The fortunate men have no trouble with the marketplace or with marketplace psychology—but women have to unlearn their socialization and imitate the male style. One book on how women can make it in managerial jobs counsels: “Above all, don’t show emotion and never cry in front of a male co-worker. Men have spent their lives learning to repress tears; women have a lot of catching up to do.”73

  Assertiveness Training, like popular psychology generally, was meant to be applied to all situations—work, sexual relationships, friendships. One assertiveness-training book opens with the following illustration of how to be “assertive” with a woman friend: in the story, “you” are at home alone, the housework done. You have some free time—two hours “just for yourself.” Then the phone rings. It’s a friend asking if you would please, as a very special favor, watch her two-year-old daughter Alison for the morning while she goes out to a meeting. You have a “familiar sinking feeling in your stomach.” You really wanted those two hours for yourself:

  If you were non-assertive you could simply deny your own wishes, and agree to care for Alison: “Well, I was going to do something else, but it really doesn’t matter. O.K., bring her over.”

  Or you could say, assertively, “I know it’s a drag to take Alison with you, but I’ve set aside two hours for myself this morning, so I won’t be able to take her today.”74

  The book promises to help you learn to do what you want to do. Neatly evaded is the annoying question of what is right to do. There is no room here for you to balance Alison’s mother’s need to go to the meeting against your need to have two hours alone; nor of Alison’s mother’s relative hardships against your own. The only possible reason to take care of Alison is because you want to do it (which in fact the authors assume you don’t). One is left to wonder what will become of Alison’s mother when she arrives at her meeting, child-in-tow, only to be told—assertively—that they really don’t want children at the meetings any more.

  But in the dog-eat-dog sexual marketplace no woman can afford an old-fashioned sense of responsibility to other women. One assertiveness training book lists a series of single women’s rights, including the right to—“date a married man”:

  Do you want this right? It’s a decision only you can make. Today, in these days of urban renewal, Back Street has practically ceased to exist. The Other Woman is alive, well, and living everywhere from one-room efficiency to posh pad … today’s OW may suffer some guilts, but she … does not consider herself immoral; she sees herself as a moral, self-respecting woman who is in the Other Woman situation.75

  It is over the issue of having children that marketplace psychology completely broke down as a practical philosophy for women. The relationships in the pop psychology books were never relationships with children, and when a child appeared like little Alison, it was assumed that nobody wanted her. After all, how can you run a relationship with a child on the principle of equivalent exchange? Do you ignore the infant who doesn’t give you enough “strokes”? Refuse to make breakfast for the two-year-old who peed on its sheets last night? Desert a child who doesn’t meet your needs (kindly reciting the Gestalt Prayer as you go)? When confronted with the problem of children—always introduced as a “problem,” an obstacle to women’s mobility—the marketplace psychologists suddenly became rigid, judgmental and even scolding:

  I’m not against day care or careers for women. But having children is—or ought to be—a choice. If women want to have babies, they should. If they don’t want to raise children, they shouldn’t have them … They can lobby for day-care centers if they like, but they shouldn’t feel like victims.76

  And in Winners and Losers, the authors ask themselves: “Aren’t divorced men better off, because they’re usually without children, involved in work, and also freer to find social and sexual partners?” and answer:

  If men are better off in any area of divorce, it’s because they choose to be better off; if women are worse off, it’s because they’ve chosen to be worse off … As for freedom from children, the best way to be free from children is not to conceive them.…77

  Psychological ideology had swung 180 degrees from the neo-Freudian theories of libidinal motherhood and female masochism. From being the only source of fulfillment in a woman’s life children had become an obstacle to her freedom. From being a symbolic act of submission, sex had become a pleasurable commodity that women as well as men had a right to demand. But if the rules imposed by the old domestic ideology had denied w
omen any future other than service to the family, the new psychology seemed to deny human bonds altogether—for women or for men. Pop psychology, which had begun with the effusive evocation of universal joy, ended up with the grim “realism” of the lifeboat strategy: not everyone can get on board, so survival depends on learning how to fight it out on the way to “getting yours.” Despite their radical break with the old domestic ideology, the experts of marketplace psychology ended up promoting an ideal of women’s nature that was no less distorted and limiting than the ideal that had once been advanced by nineteenth-century gynecology.

  * However, Deutsch herself had only one child. In a 1973 interview she recalled how he was raised mostly by a nurse named Paula. “Busy with her work, his mother recalls, ‘I had to slip a $5 note under her door to see my son.’ Dr. Deutsch doesn’t approve of this sort of substitute mothering and suffered guilt over it, but she says the experience doesn’t seem to have harmed her son.”4

  † For example, psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte described the clitoris as “a phallus, atrophied in comparison with the male penis.…” This “rudimentary” organ is “never destined to achieve, even in its owner’s imagination, the degree of activity to which the penis can lay claim, for in this respect the male organ is far better endowed by nature.” Yet in the same paragraph Bonaparte reveals that “the functional maladjustment of women of the clitoridal type” is that the clitoris is “too highly charged with active impulses.”5

  ‡ It is striking that the author chose a female gynecologist for this fictional anecdote. Not more than 5 percent of gynecologists were women at this time, and one could hardly imagine a less “truly feminine” woman than a woman physician. In fact, the author has this doctor smoking a cigarette, while we are told that her feminine patients have made a masochistic adjustment to their husbands’ smoking. Apparently there was room for a few masculinized, scientific women, so long as they made their careers out of exposing the unfemininity of other women—as did Marynia Farnham, Helene Deutsch, and Therese Benedek in real life.

  § He went on to explain that the way “business” dealt with the commune threat was by keeping them out of the media. Thus there are no situation comedies about life in a commune, no ads, etc.

  ‖ This turned out to be a temporary decline. Today many childless couples and even singles are investing in suburban homes.

  a With tragic results—the substitution of formula-feeding for breast-feeding, often promoted by saleswomen dressed as medical personnel, led to increased infant mortality due to intestinal infections and malnutrition, since poor women often overdiluted the formula to make it go further, and because they lack refrigeration.

  b Actually scientific and sociological evidence of the primary role of the clitoris in female sexuality had never been lacking. Havelock Ellis, at the beginning of the century, and Alfred Kinsey, in the middle of the century, had both on the basis of their research disagreed with the Freudian distinction between a vaginal and a clitoral orgasm and had declared that the clitoris was the chief organ of female sexual pleasure. Kinsey, for example, pointed out that female mastur-batory and lesbian practices showed the relative unimportance of penile penetration to female orgasm. Furthermore, physiological evidence available from at least the late nineteen forties on contradicted psychoanalysis, since female sexual nerve-ends for the perception of orgasm were absent in the vagina and abundant in the clitoris. But despite the clinical, physiological, anatomical, and sociological evidence, not to mention the possibilities of personal observation, mid-century doctors and psychiatrists refused to acknowledge the role of the clitoris in female sexual activity. Until women themselves began to take apart the edifice of sexual masochism, the wealth of evidence was simply ignored.

  c Writing in the sixties, Schutz had political ambitions that HPM techniques could be useful in containing youthful radicalism. He hoped that what he had to teach would ease the “current ‘credibility gap’ … that is eroding a political administration,” and that it would answer “youth’s demand that we ‘tell it like it is.’ ” He even went so far as to suggest that the new techniques might match the joys of the drug culture.

  AFTERWORD:

  THE END OF THE ROMANCE

  In the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, a completely new cultural figure appeared, seemingly out of nowhere: a woman defiant, dismissive of any dictum that woman should “know her place.” She was the archetype of a quickly multiplying sisterhood. The modern women’s liberation movement had arrived en masse to reject all the reigning stereotypes of femininity, from subservient mom to seductive single, and even more importantly, to challenge male domination itself, in medicine and every other authority structure.

  The movement was a coming-to-consciousness of changes that were already expanding possibilities for women’s lives, such as the widespread availability of contraception and abortion, and the declining need, in an overpopulated world, for women to have many children—or even become mothers at all. But more fundamentally, it was the seismic jolt of an economic and social transformation—the massive mid-century entry of women into the workforce—that shook up all settled assumptions about woman’s nature and woman’s place.

  By the end of the nineteen seventies half of all women were working, although at much lower wages than men. For the first time in history, women could imagine that if they left home—or were cast out—they would survive and even thrive. Women’s independence finally gathered the momentum and mass to demolish the ideology that had constrained it. It spelled the end of the domestic solution, the collapse of the industrial-age ideas that had “solved” the Woman Question and sealed it shut for over a century and a half. No longer would woman be born to obey, nor would a man’s home remain a castle for him and him alone.

  Yet, the domestic solution had persisted for so long in part because it claimed a moral basis. Men’s rationale was that they did not keep women housebound to exploit them, but to protect them from the ravages of a cold, cruel world. The ivied home with the angel inside represented, in however sentimental a fashion, fundamental emotional longings that could not be met in the marketplace—needs for love and intimacy, for nurture and caring. It promised a safe haven for the weak, the young, and the aged in a Darwinian world that rewarded only the strong. The domestic solution—compared to the jungle of the Market—held appeal for many women as well as men.

  What female critical thinkers of every era saw clearly, though, was the distorting hypocrisy that resulted from separating life, and the two sexes, into opposing spheres. The domestic solution was a reaction to the harshness of economic life, elevating women as morally superior beings. But at the same time it took all the responsibility for love and caring and placed it squarely on the backs of women alone. It chose not to remake the world, but to demand that women make up for the world. Even from the Victorian-era beginnings, when the pedestal seemed most secure, this was a task that could only lead to defeat, even shame. Women worked to maintain the home as a sanctuary for human values. But it was as if they were holding up a falling wall.

  Women tried to be “feminine,” and found themselves forced to be the negation of everything purposeful and dynamic. Even in her own limited realm, if a wife asserted an independent opinion over simple family or even personal bodily decisions, psychomedical experts often stood ready, along with husbands or fathers, to block her way. The demand that women “humanize” society through her duties at home, while experts supervised every step from on high, was impossible.

  In the nineteen fifties and sixties, many women formed their identities in homes emptied of productive value and advertised as paradisal places where machines performed almost all but the psychological and decorative functions of housewives. Most married young, and many worked as ladylike and low-paid sales- and clerical workers in the “pink-collar ghetto,” or as teachers, social workers, or nurses, before and after marriage and children.

  Even well-educated wives had little control over personal
or household assets, and lacked the authority to so much as open a credit account without a husband’s permission. Financially, most were more like dependents than partners to husbands, even in affectionate matches. At a time when marital rape was not recognized as a crime, abortion was illegal, and domestic abuse was often subtly or openly condoned, a wife sometimes felt like little more than a servant: valuable only for what she did in accord with the master’s wishes, and dispensable should she cease to please. Many signaled their daughters: “Don’t follow my path.” When Betty Freidan’s book The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, these frustrated wives made it a surprise best-seller. Among them were women of the older generation who joined—or helped organize—the grassroots feminist revolt of the sixties and seventies.

  Their metaphorical “daughters,” the radical young founders of the women’s liberation movement, were a different breed. Many had been activists in, or had been deeply influenced by, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. They saw racial inferiority exposed as a myth and witnessed the rise of anti-imperialist and nationalist revolutions. Inevitably they found an analogy between women and blacks, between women and all other oppressed people. The image of docile domesticity, for all its chivalry and sentiment, suddenly seemed to exist only to conceal the most ancient injustice: the forcible rule of men over women.